OXfOUD BOOK r.:HOF* 
 
THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
THE 
 ROYAL ROAD 
 
 BEING THE STORY OF THE LIFE, DEATH, AND 
 RESURRECTION OF EDWARD HANKEY OF LONDON 
 
 BY 
 
 ALFRED OLLIVANT 
 
 AUTHOR OF " BOB, SON OF BATTLE," " REDCOAT CAPTAIN," 
 
 "THE GENTLEMAN," " THE TAMING OF 
 
 JOHN BLUNT." ETC. 
 
 Dost thou think to escape that which no mortal ever could avoid ? 
 For even our Lord Jesus Christ Himself was not for one hour 
 of His life without the anguish of His passion. 
 
 And how dost thou seek another Road, than this Royal Road, 
 which is the Road of the Holy Cross ? 
 
 — Thomas a Kempis 
 
 Garden City New York 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 
 1912 
 
Copyright, 1912, by 
 
 DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & Co. 
 
 All rights reserved, including that of 
 
 translation into foreign languages, 
 
 including the Scandinavian. 
 
To 
 BEATRICE WEBB 
 
 393816 
 
Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie 
 Thy souVs immensity, 
 
 — Wordsworth 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Book I 
 HIS LIFE 
 
 IAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. His Birth 3 
 
 II. His Childhood 11 
 
 III. His Boyhood 22 
 
 IV. His Youth 34 
 
 V. His Manhood 45 
 
 VI. His Marriage 54 
 
 VII. His Honeymoon 62 
 
 VIII. His Home 78 
 
 IX. His Child 90 
 
 X. His Fatherhood 104 
 
 Book II 
 HIS DEATH 
 
 Part I 
 
 Pinched 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XI. The Happy Family 117 
 
 XII. The Shadow 125 
 
 XIII. A Glimpse of the Abyss 135 
 
 XIV. Tap-tap 144 
 
 XV. The Weak Spot 153 
 
 XVI. Mr. Edward 159 
 
 XVH. The Lull 166 
 
 XVHI. The Two Men 171 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XIX. Outside 177 
 
 XX. In There 185 
 
 XXI. Miss English to the Rescue 195 
 
 Part II 
 Squeezed 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXII. The Plank 203 
 
 XXIII. The Rot 215 
 
 XXIV. Spun Off 222 
 
 XXV. Tap-tap 228 
 
 XXVI. The Brink of the Abyss 240 
 
 XXVII. The Crucified 245 
 
 XXVIII. The Relieving Officer 255 
 
 XXIX. The Board of Guardians ....*. 269 
 
 XXX. Before the Board 275 
 
 XXXI. The Blow 282 
 
 Part III 
 Crushed 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXXII. Teddy Returns Home 293 
 
 XXXIII. The Man with the Razor 300 
 
 XXXIV. The Old Friend 307 
 
 XXXV. Dr. English Lies 320 
 
 Book III 
 HIS RESURRECTION 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXXVI. The Resurrection Morning .... 331 
 
 XXXVII. The Priest of To-day 341 
 
 XXXVIII. The Last of the Relieving Officer . . 348 
 
 XXXIX. The Policeman 353 
 
 XL. Falling Dusk . 358 
 
 XLI. Teddy Triumphant 364 
 
Book I 
 HIS LIFE 
 
THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 i 
 
 HIS BIRTH 
 
 Teddy Hankey was the new sort of workingman — 
 common to Europe and America: a product of the towns 
 and twentieth century. 
 
 He was not burly; he was not beery; and he was not 
 slow of mind or body. 
 
 There was nothing about him of the navvy. 
 
 His strength lay in his hands and not in his arms and 
 back and legs. 
 
 In his life he had never swung a pick or sledge; never 
 driven a spade home; never clung to the jolting plough as 
 it sheered its shining way through seas of rich red tilth. 
 His working-clothes were not earth-soiled and russet- 
 hued — he was too far from the old brown mother to 
 know kiss of hers; nor was he ever gartered beneath the 
 knee. Corduroys were unknown to him: his working- 
 duds had once been his Sunday suit. 
 
 This workingman was not the machine that wrings its 
 
 3 
 
4 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 riches from the earth as his forbears had been; he was the 
 man behind the machine. 
 
 In Europe and America there were hundreds of thou- 
 sands of him. 
 
 His grandfather had lived and died in Sussex, labouring 
 his life through over clay fallows behind a groaning ox- 
 team, their necks bowed beneath the yoke as they 
 slouched sullenly along, breathing clouds about their feet. 
 He had talked the high slow up-and-down nasal dialect of 
 his county, could mow his two acres a day with those long- 
 sweeping brown arms of his, and on Sundays donned a 
 black coat and laboured heavily to church, touching his 
 hat to the squire and the young ladies, toward whom he 
 felt much the same dull respectful kindliness his ox-team 
 felt for him. 
 
 Abraham Boniface had been his name; and his name 
 suited his nature. He was never outside Sussex all his 
 days and lived and died within half a mile of the black 
 timbered cottage under an old yew which had heard his 
 first cry. 
 
 His son Job had the restlessness in his blood of the new 
 generation. As a young man he heard the call of the 
 towns and answered it. At twenty, when the dairymaid 
 at the Hall jilted him for one of the undergardeners, he 
 kissed his mother, turned his back on the blue wall of the 
 South Downs his fathers had seen for generations across 
 
HIS BIRTH 5 
 
 the smoking plough, and set his face for the North, all his 
 possessions in a chequered handkerchief. 
 
 From the top of Leith Hill he looked his last upon the 
 wooded Weald in which his ancestors had lived and died 
 for centuries, on to the Downs upholding heaven beyond, 
 and the flash of the sea thrusting into Shoreham Gap. 
 
 Then he tramped down the hill and a great billow of 
 earth surged up for ever between him and the home of his 
 forbears; and he was sucked down by the huge Octopus- 
 town that spread its feelers for miles along the shining 
 barge-laden river — the town that had absorbed in the 
 past century millions such as himself, simple souls, the 
 clay still clinging to their boots. 
 
 Thus Job Boniface dropped out of the sunshine, the 
 mists, and large spaciousness of the country into the 
 shadow and swirl and mutter of the city. At first he pined 
 for the great spaces; and often as he walked the streets 
 lifted his face to find a wall rising across his fine of vision 
 instead of the familiar barrier of blue hills he had half 
 expected. And always the wall brought with it the same 
 sense of disappointment, and his soaring mind fell like a 
 shot bird. Indeed he was walled in. Walls came between 
 him and heaven. He could not feel the wind upon his 
 brow for walls; he could not catch a glimpse of refreshing 
 green for walls; the sun could not get at him for walls. 
 
 London was for him the place of walls. 
 
 The hard pavements burned his feet; and he longed for 
 
6 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 the soft cool squelch of the clay. Yet he stayed on, 
 mastered against his will by he knew not what of siren 
 charm in his new mistress as thousands of his fellow- 
 mariners had been before him. And he found a job along 
 of horses in a brewery, which somewhat comforted his 
 soul in exile. 
 
 In London Job met and ultimately married a woman 
 who was queer. 
 
 Elizabeth Hankey was not his own class or kind; and 
 quite how she came to tumble up against Job Boniface in 
 the melting-pot of the great town it would be hard to say; 
 and harder still perhaps to hazard how she came to many 
 him. 
 
 It may be that she had to earn a living and knew herself 
 quite incompetent to do so; it may be that his bulk and 
 brawn inspired confidence in her ansemic bosom; it may 
 be that his large uncouth country air of a strayed cow lost 
 in a humming thoroughfare and dreaming of lush mead- 
 ows, his broad speech, his broad smile, his broad harvest 
 eyes appealed to her town-bred senses. 
 
 Certainly the pair had little in common but poverty; 
 yet theirs was by no means an unhappy marriage. The 
 big Southron with the smell of the country still upon him 
 gave to the street-bred woman a certain massiveness, 
 security, and strength she sadly needed, while absorbing 
 into his own rude blood and being something of his wife's 
 
HIS BIRTH 7 
 
 refinement. For there was more than a little of the 
 lady about Elizabeth Hankey — by instinct and tradition. 
 And Job was quite man enough to recognize his own 
 coarser clay and respect and be proud of the finer nature 
 of his wife. 
 
 A thin-blooded, thin-boned woman, tall and somewhat 
 tumble-down, with wan spiritual face, hollow eyes, and 
 fair sparse hair, her shoulders were round, her chest flat; 
 and there was a permanently scared look in her eyes, as 
 though she feared the rough world, which her gentle nature 
 had found too much for it. 
 
 She was above all things street-bred — with always a 
 touch of the lady in her manner and her bearing. It was 
 even said that her mother was a governess who had fallen. 
 That was gossip only: it did not come from Mrs. Boniface; 
 and when a flashy neighbour, who believed herself to be 
 likewise of superior if left-handed lineage, touched upon 
 the point, she only blushed faintly. Her mother's secret 
 and her mother's shame, if shame there had been, were as 
 safe in the keeping of the gentle, tenacious woman as in the 
 grave. 
 
 There was indeed a delicacy and a fragrance about her 
 as of a garden flower flagging in exile amid sturdy vege- 
 tables. The comfortable solidity of the middle-classes 
 was not hers. She was above them and beneath them; 
 nearer perhaps to the remote aristocracy, and by reason of 
 her natural simplicity not so far happily from the class 
 
8 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 among whom her lot was thrown, yet separated from that 
 class by the faint mysterious bloom of her ladyhood. 
 
 She was out of place in her home alongside her broad- 
 speeched, big-limbed mate — yet she was fond of him; and 
 out of place in her surroundings — yet she had no enemies. 
 
 "She's come down in the world," her neighbours said, 
 and left her alone except when she needed them — which 
 was fairly often. 
 
 They recognized she was not quite one of themselves; 
 but she gave herself no airs and was always willing to help, 
 and, what was spiritually of far greater worth, to be 
 helped. And of the two, to be honest, she received far 
 more than she gave. But there was something so appeal- 
 ing about her gentle weakness as never to fail to tap the 
 springs of generosity in her neighbours' hearts. 
 
 Mrs. Boniface could love. 
 
 And there was, moreover, about her a romantic sense of 
 tragedy which touched to poetry the souls of the simple 
 poor among whom she lived. 
 
 They summed it up in their own unconsciously dramatic 
 way: 
 
 " I dare say her mother kept a servant — if one only 
 knew. " 
 
 Mrs. Boniface never went to the wash-tub, in her 
 husband's old-fashioned country phrase; which signified 
 that he was earning just enough to keep his wife from 
 going out to work. And it was as well, for Mrs. Boniface 
 
HIS BERTH 9 
 
 was quite unfitted to the wash-tub or indeed to any form 
 of wrestling with the world. 
 
 In more ways than one she was something of a lady. 
 She had nerves. Mrs. Boniface distinctly had nerves, 
 queer fancies — especially before Teddy came into the 
 world. 
 
 That little boy was born in the hum of five million men 
 and women, who did not greatly care. 
 
 The miracle took place in a dingy room looking out on 
 yards hung with washing, on a mangy tortoise-shell cat 
 crouching upon a wall, and on the backs of other small 
 drab houses. 
 
 He had not been in the world five minutes before it 
 began to bring pressure to bear on his defenceless little 
 self, as though determined to drive out the recruit who had 
 only just fought his way into the ranks. 
 
 The eyes of the doctor, washing his hands in the 
 corner, wandered about the room, which was bare, even 
 of texts. 
 
 Drying his hands, he came and stood over his patient. 
 
 "You must tell your husband when he comes in to have 
 my fee of one guinea and a half for me when next I call," 
 he said firmly. "One guinea and one half — d'you see? 
 He should have left it for me to-day. " 
 
 "Very good, sir," said the new mother, weakly wiping 
 away the tears that still bedewed her cheek. 
 
 He went out; and the stout woman in the apron dand- 
 
10 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 ling the new boy at the foot of the bed looked after him 
 with eyes of assumed indignation. Her own fee was 
 safe in her pocket — paid down before she would cross the 
 threshold. 
 
 "I don't like that," she said. "He's a hard 'un, is 
 Doctor Thorns." 
 
n 
 
 HIS CHILDHOOD 
 
 In that hard dun grabbing world, amid the roar and 
 tumult of millions grinding against each other in the tides 
 of Time, the soul of Teddy Hankey blossomed. 
 
 The colour, music, and mysterious huge life of the ele- 
 ments went not to the making of his soul. The majestic 
 rhythm of trees marching in ranks to battle; a storm- 
 thrush shouting on a windy spray against the blue; the 
 large comfort of earth, red and green and goodly; the 
 ripple of larks in heaven spraying the dusty souls of men 
 with song; the sound and splendour of the deliberate sea — 
 of these his waking eyes and ears knew nothing. 
 
 The boy was born into a world made by men for men. 
 Therefore it was a world of men and walls and lamps. 
 The men and walls were for the day; the* lamps for the 
 night — and between the two there was a gray bit, mys- 
 teriously looming, which was very dear to the little lad's 
 soul. 
 
 It was not till he was knickerbockered that he noticed 
 one evening a bright and tiny eye peeping at him from 
 behind a tall chimney. The remote twinkling thing 
 
 11 
 
12 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 frightened him. He plucked at his mother's hand and 
 stopped and stared. 
 
 "Look, mum!" he whispered. "Weeny lamp." 
 
 "Yes, lovey," said the tired woman "It's a star." 
 
 The little boy gazed. 
 
 " It's a long a-way off, " he said wisely. " Who lit it? " 
 
 "Eh, I don't know, dearie," his mother answered 
 wearily. 
 
 The little boy looked for the star again next night and, 
 when he found it playing peep-po behind the chimney, he 
 welcomed it with smiles as a new friend. 
 
 But it was seldom that the child's eyes lifted to heaven. 
 There was too much on earth to interest them, fascinated, 
 as they were, by the swirl of the great city, eddying, 
 seething, sucking all about them. 
 
 His tiny seeking soul found something of the Spirit in 
 the immense movement and mystery of Life on every side. 
 
 And walled in as he was, the infinite tide of beauty, that 
 steals through or over every obstacle, crept in upon him 
 here and there in gleams. 
 
 In the spring a dismal tree, drooping in exile, would 
 fling forth a sudden cloud of green, and cause the child's 
 heart to sing within him. The moon sailing by night 
 amid white escorting galleons across a black abyss amazed 
 the boy and made him clutch at it open-mouthed. Over- 
 head too there was always a narrow strip of sky — bright 
 or dull and always changing; and at his feet there was 
 
HIS CHILDHOOD 13 
 
 such another strip of sky in which were funny houses 
 mostly black that moved and made a noise and smoked 
 at the chimney. 
 
 That second strip of sky, flowing along the land, the 
 little boy loved most of all. His best hours as a child were 
 passed in his father's arms on one of London's bridges. 
 The old Thames was the tiny cockney's mate and comrade 
 from the first; and many a joke the two had together, 
 while he was still inarticulate. As a baby, whenever he 
 caught a glimpse of his elusive friend, he danced and bub- 
 bled in his father's arms and grasped at it with chubby fist. 
 
 The river ran before the child's eyes like a great snake 
 toward the sea, and ran, and ran; and as it ran it changed 
 its skin. Sometimes it was silvery, sometimes brown, and 
 sometimes blue; and always slipping away under dark 
 bridges between the houses that came crowding down to 
 the waterside calling it to stop. But it would not stop. 
 It ran on and on for ever in shining purity, washing its 
 mud banks and making them sweet, away and away from 
 the murk, and smoke, and prison walls, away and away, 
 escaping from its narrow boundaries into the infinite 
 ocean that waited it widespread beneath the sky beyond. 
 
 And something in the spirit of the flying river appealed 
 to the soul of the wall-bound baby. As he looked down 
 on its swirling brown waters, his father's arms about him, 
 his father's weathered cheek against his round rose-white 
 one, the seagulls swooping about him on angel wings, he 
 
14 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 would wake to a new life, seeming to cry to the fugitive 
 stream beneath — Faster I faster I 
 
 A cockney to the roots of him, down in the depths of 
 little Teddy lurked the soul of a poet, nourished on his 
 mother's milk. 
 
 From the first indeed he was very much his mother's 
 boy — slight-boned, delicate, and with her somewhat 
 scared blue eyes. 
 
 And like his mother, Teddy could love. 
 
 Often his little hand came creeping into hers; and when 
 their eyes met a smile, sudden and very sweet, would well 
 up out of their deeps of speedwell blue. He was always on 
 her lap, or sitting on a tiny stool at her feet, his head 
 against her knees. 
 
 Mother and child lived in each other's hearts. They 
 sought the Infinite together thus, and not upon their knees. 
 There was perhaps more true love in that house than in 
 any other house in Fish Street; and it was the only one 
 in which there were no texts. That was remarkable and 
 remarked. 
 
 The schoolmaster had it that the mother of Mrs. Boni- 
 face had been the daughter of a clergyman, who had shut 
 his door against his child in the hour of her necessity. 
 
 Certainly Mrs. Boniface never went to church, and the 
 name of God was seldom heard on her lips. 
 
 Her religion was to love. 
 
HIS CHILDHOOD 15 
 
 She said no prayers and taught her child none. She 
 was of those who pray only in the spirit, and know not 
 even that. 
 
 Once indeed a youthful and somewhat aggressive curate 
 called and subjected her to a cross-examination on the state 
 of her soul. 
 
 "I trust at all events you believe in God, Mrs. Boni- 
 face," he ended. 
 
 The gentle creature trembled. "I'm sure I don't 
 know, sir," she answered with downcast eyes. "I don't 
 know what to make of it all. It's too much for me. " 
 
 The curate turned. Himself he was cocksure with the 
 cocksureness of twenty-five. 
 
 "Bright lookout for your boy," he muttered, and 
 marched down the street. 
 
 The poor woman snatched up the little lad and nursed 
 him. 
 
 "I can only love him," she cried. "God can hardly 
 blame me for that. " 
 
 A desolate figure she made, woebegone and weeping, as 
 she rocked to and fro, the child's bright head against 
 her breast, and his blue eyes streaming sympathetic 
 tears. 
 
 On the whole, in spite of curates, Mrs. Boniface was 
 as happy in these years after the birth of her little boy 
 as so weak a woman could be in a world which is for the 
 strong. 
 
16 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Mother and child, tossing together in that great welter 
 of a town, filled each other's hearts to brimming with joy 
 and pain. 
 
 It was not to last for long. 
 
 One day when Teddy was still a little chap his father 
 did not return home at noon from the brewery hard by 
 where he worked. The manager came instead at a trot, 
 his collar limp. 
 
 When his mother heard what the manager had to say 
 she seized the child up in her arms and rushed down the 
 street screaming: 
 
 "Job! Job! take me too — me and Teddy." 
 
 But Job could not do that. He lay very quiet in a shed 
 with a tarpaulin over his face; while a little crowd of men 
 hung over a stable door close by muttering that they had 
 always known how it would be. 
 
 Within, a great shaggy horse, conscious of crime, and 
 quick with fear of punishment, sweated and shivered and 
 rolled its eyes, snorting through wide-blown nostrils. 
 
 After that, Teddy's daddy never came home, though his 
 hat and coat still hung in the passage. 
 
 When the boy asked his mother where his daddy had 
 gone, she answered simply, 
 
 "I don't know, dear," and he noticed that she wore 
 black, and was strangely quiet. 
 
 For hours together she sat with her wan face and hollow 
 
HIS CHILDHOOD 17 
 
 eyes staring before her, Teddy nursed upon her knee. 
 She never wept and rarely spoke. Her mouth was usually 
 a little open, and there was no light in her face, and little 
 answer when he smiled. She was dull and dead and knew 
 it. When he plucked at her and whimpered for acknowl- 
 edgment, 
 
 "I can't help it, lovey," she said quietly. 
 
 Mother Maherty, a kind Irish neighbour, came in 
 and did the house, and took him off to play with her 
 children. 
 
 A clergyman visited his mother and told her not un- 
 kindly she must stir herself. 
 
 She answered simply? 
 
 "I can't, sir." 
 
 "Well, I can't help you if you won't help yourself," 
 he answered with quiet decision, and went out. 
 
 Then a tall man with a bag came — and went. 
 
 After that nobody else came but the man for the rent; 
 and there was nothing to eat. 
 
 Mrs. Boniface sat and nursed her boy all day. He 
 cried for food. She undid her bodice, and offered him her 
 lean breast. 
 
 Mrs. Maherty, her kind Irish neighbour, came in and 
 saw her. 
 
 "And where's the sense in that, sweet love?" she asked. 
 "You're dry as the nether millstone, sure." 
 
 "It's all I've got to offer him," the mother whimpered. 
 
18 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 For days and nights the little boy seemed to sit so, while 
 his mother muttered about Jesus. 
 
 "Who's Jesus, mum?" asked the little fellow, weep- 
 ing in sympathy. "And will he give me something to 
 eat?" 
 
 The mother did not answer. 
 
 Something he had heard in the street about this man 
 stole back upon the mind of the little boy. 
 
 "Does he love me, mum?" he asked. 
 
 "I hope so, dearie," his mother answered. "No one 
 else does — only me. That's a sure thing. " 
 
 That afternoon the man with the bag came again and 
 talked at length and kindly. 
 
 The little boy upon his mother's knee hearkened to a 
 perpetually recurring word. 
 
 "What's the Workhouse, mum?" he asked. 
 
 "It's where they want to put you and me, dear love," 
 the mother cried. "Take you from me. Partus." 
 
 "You may see him once a week," said the man, 
 soothingly. 
 
 "Once a week!" screamed the mother, suddenly shrill. 
 "And he's my flesh. I'd sooner tramp the streets with 
 him in my arms. " 
 
 The tall man turned away. 
 
 "'Ave it your own way of course, Mrs. Boniface," 
 he said gently. "Only it seems rather 'ard on the 
 little'un." 
 
HIS CHILDHOOD 19 
 
 Then some one found Mrs. Boniface a job as a char- 
 woman. 
 
 On a bitter morning of March she went down on her 
 hands and knees and cleaned the steps of a small trades- 
 man's house. 
 
 A fat vulgar woman in frizzled white hair, the trades- 
 man's wife, stood at the window of her warm room and 
 watched. Sometimes she tapped at the pane. A coarse 
 though kindly creature, she liked her work well done. 
 
 Suddenly the wisp of delicate woman, clad in east wind 
 it seemed and little else, fell over on her side. 
 
 The fat woman ran out crying, "Gracious!" 
 
 With the help of her maid she supported her charwoman 
 indoors and gave her whiskey. Later she called a cab and 
 took her home, giving her two shillings at the door; though, 
 as she said with smiles to her minister, when next he called : 
 
 "It was charity. She hadn't done sixpennor'th of 
 work. " 
 
 Then the man with the bag came again. 
 
 Teddy's mother seemed amenable to persuasion this 
 time. 
 
 She said, "Yes, sir," and even smiled. 
 
 The man gave her a paper, and a word of encourage- 
 ment. 
 
 "It's all right once you're in," he said. "It's just the 
 first plunge. I quite understand. " 
 
20 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 She said, "Thank you, sir," and watched his back 
 down the street. 
 
 When he was round the corner, she huddled the boy 
 in an old shawl, and hunted shadow-like toward the 
 river. 
 
 "It's together, lovey, at any rate," she cried. "They 
 can't take you from me there. " 
 
 It was the boy, wide-eyed upon her shoulder, and suck- 
 ing at his thumb, who saved her. 
 
 "'Bye," he bleated to Mother Maherty across the 
 street. "We're off, mum and me." 
 
 The fat woman floundered panting in pursuit. 
 
 "Where is it you're off to, Mrs. Boniface?" she 
 asked. 
 
 " To the river, " the other whispered. " Teddy and me. 
 They can't separate us there. " 
 
 The great kind Irishwoman put her strong mothering 
 arm about the frail waist of the other and stayed her. 
 
 "The river!" she said. "What's the matter with the 
 ould river then?" 
 
 The wretched woman with the wrung face began to 
 weep and tremble. 
 
 "It's calling me," she cried. "The river's calling me. 
 It's our friend. " 
 
 "Come home with me, Acushla," said her big, brave 
 neighbour. "It's not the river's calling you at all. It's 
 the ould Devil himself. " 
 
HIS CHILDHOOD 21 
 
 Next day men came for his mother. She went quietly. 
 As they put her into the cab he saw her scared eyes, lit 
 with a wild gleam of love and hope and passion. 
 
 "Bring him along to the river to-night, Mrs. Maherty, " 
 she whispered. "The river's our friend. It's all one 
 there." 
 
HI 
 HIS BOYHOOD 
 
 After that Teddy passed a hundred tragic and tremen- 
 dous hours, which haunted him through life. 
 
 At the end of the hundred hours he went to live with 
 Aunt Eleanor of Lambeth. 
 
 Aunt Eleanor of Lambeth, who always looked shocked, 
 was a cold white woman, much like her sister but without 
 her anxious eyes or wan spirituality. 
 
 Tall and austere, she always dressed in black with a little 
 frill of white about her throat; and she was above all 
 things genteel. At social gatherings of the church of 
 which she was an honoured and ornamental prop she wore 
 black satin and was often taken for the widow of a clergy- 
 man. 
 
 It was the grief of her life that she could not afford a 
 servant. Her hands were beautifully kept, and she was 
 justly proud of them. When she washed the plates, and 
 peeled the potatoes, her door was always locked. Nobody 
 in Lambeth had ever seen Miss Hankey with her sleeves 
 rolled up. 
 
HIS BOYHOOD 23 
 
 Unlike her sister she was fond of telling the few with 
 whom she cared to consort that her mother was a gover- 
 ness, who had come down in the world — a very 'ighly 
 educated woman, who knew German and French, and 
 learned Art at the Slade School, and played her own violin. 
 
 By nature she was a Puritan; but the passion of her life 
 was to be a lady. And when the two strains in her 
 clashed the latter conquered. Thus it came that as a 
 young woman she had been for some time the mistress of a 
 gentleman. She had not cared for him, and was too cold- 
 blooded to be in the least a libertine. The position had 
 seemed to her more genteel than that of assistant in a 
 shop; and she had overcome her very considerable scruples 
 by assuring her Maker that thus and thus only could she 
 save the sinner's soul for Him. Indeed she came to look 
 upon herself in this regard as a kind of saint — martyred 
 by the world for making a sacrifice it could not understand. 
 
 Moreover it was always her intention to marry the 
 sinner when she had converted him. 
 
 Unhappily she was disappointed alike of husband and 
 convert. 
 
 To her bitter chagrin he dismissed her after a time, 
 affirming as his reason that she always looked so damned 
 shocked. To assuage her grief he gave her £100 down 
 and £1 a week in perpetuity. 
 
 It was the great affront of her fife. She never forgave 
 the offender, but she took the cash. 
 
24 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Thereafter she became passionately High Church and 
 confessed her fault without tears to a clergyman, ex- 
 pounding at length the real motive for conduct that in the 
 eyes of a world which could not understand might seem 
 a sin. 
 
 Then she settled down in Lambeth for spiritual reasons. 
 
 When Teddy's mother went to an asylum, Aunt Elea- 
 nor took her only sister's child to live with her, not from 
 love but as a religious duty. 
 
 And her action in so doing was all the more Christian 
 because, as she was careful to tell the curate, who was 
 almost the only person in Lambeth with whom she cared 
 to consort, she had never approved of Elizabeth's marriage 
 — never. 
 
 Mr. Boniface was quite a common man — quite; and 
 his talk was that broad. Really she couldn't hardly make 
 him out. And he used such strange words with it too. 
 When she had asked him if he was a countryman he had 
 answered, if you please — 7 be. She had heard tell his 
 father was a ploughman — only Mr. Hobart must never 
 repeat that, please, never. It would be so lowering for the 
 little boy in after life. What her sister had been thinking 
 about to go and do a thing like that she couldn't conceive. 
 Of course poor Elizabeth had always been very queer. 
 But it was a great come down. The Hankeys were poor; 
 but they were genteel, and 'eld their 'eads with the 'ighest 
 
HIS BOYHOOD 25 
 
 in the land. Thank God, her dear mother had not lived 
 to see her daughter's fall. 
 
 And the name itself was so — so rustic. Boniface! — 
 It made her think of a smelly farmyard and men carrying 
 sacks. 
 
 So the first thing his aunt did on taking the little boy 
 into her house was to change his name. 
 
 Teddy Boniface became Edward Hankey. 
 
 It took the religious lady some time to implant the new 
 truth upon the stubborn childish brain. 
 
 "I'm 'ittle Teddy Bonifa — ace, " blubbered the ginger- 
 haired urchin, one tiny fist to his eyes. The inherited 
 drawl on the last syllable enraged his aunt. 
 
 "Your name is Edward Hankey," said the precise 
 woman through white teeth. "Edward Hankey. Say 
 it after me now. Ed — ward Hank — ey. " 
 
 "Ed — ward 'Ankey," sobbed the child. "'Tain't 
 though." 
 
 "Hank!" said his aunt severely. "Hank, not 'Ank. 
 You mustn't drop your h's — not in my 'ouse. " 
 
 So the little fellow doffed his father's name with its 
 aroma of Sussex and the plough, and became Edward 
 Hankey of London; which was somehow much more fitting. 
 
 To Teddy his new home was no home. 
 For days he sat wistfully upon his little stool and 
 watched the door. 
 
26 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 There was something so pitiful about the thin-legged 
 morsel of humanity, sitting red-headed with his pale-blue 
 eyes for ever on the crack, that his aunt took him on her 
 lap. 
 
 He found it cold, unlike his mother's, and soon sidled 
 off, to play with a rag doll in a dark corner, and sniffle 
 to himself when he listened for footsteps that never came. 
 
 His little heart sought Love; and in that house there 
 was nothing to be found but texts, church calendars, and 
 holy books. 
 
 And for lack of what was essential to his life, the child 
 would almost certainly have followed his mother soon, 
 but that just then the great, kind, lumbering State stepped 
 in to save him. 
 
 An inspector called, and he was sent off to school. 
 
 In a great bare building that stood up naked and deso- 
 late out of an asphalt yard the little lad found what he 
 sought. 
 
 The mistress of the infants' school was a middle-aged 
 woman with tired eyes. A schoolmistress by profession, 
 she was the noblest kind of missionary by nature: for she 
 did her Master's work just as she breathed — uncon- 
 sciously. Little derelict Teddy straightway wound his 
 way into the haven of a heart in which thousands of such 
 tiny shipwrecked souls, the jetsam and flotsam of the 
 town, had found safe harbourage ere now. With her sure 
 
HIS BOYHOOD 27 
 
 sense of a childless mother, she felt the little fellow's need 
 and satisfied it, pouring herself into his hollow, aching 
 heart until it brimmed. She healed his wounds and made 
 him whole again. And when the other children were not 
 by to be jealous she would take him on her lap, kiss him, 
 and recite: 
 
 Tiger, Tiger, burning bright 
 In the Forest of the Night. 
 
 In that bleak London Board School, with scores of little 
 boys to battle with and try his emerging manhood on, 
 Teddy grew. 
 
 And in the clash of wits and fists he acquired that almost 
 defiant cockiness which seems to be the gift of the great 
 towns of to-day to their children to enable them to sur- 
 mount the miseries of their conditions on flippant wings. 
 And it was a touching sight to see him among fifty 
 other boys much as himself, collared and collarless, ragged 
 and tidy, barefoot and well-shod, singing gleefully under 
 the direction of the young Welsh teacher whose faith it 
 was that no one whose heart was full of music could go 
 very wrong: 
 
 I would not live in the crowded town. 
 
 With pavements hard and gray, 
 With lengthened streets of dusty brown. 
 And painted houses gay. 
 
 Where every boy his ball must bound 
 
 Upon his neighbour's dome, 
 And every shout and every sound 
 
 Disturbs some other's home. 
 
28 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 But his school going was not all gain. Because of it 
 Teddy Hankey at six years old began to lead a double life, 
 compelled thereto by circumstance — his life at school, 
 and his life at home. 
 
 At school he was himself — a shouting, skipping lad, 
 rather naughty and none the worse for it; drinking in 
 good and evil, and on the whole discriminating aright 
 between the two in his wise child-mind; fearing his teachers 
 a good deal and loving them not a little; earning a smile or 
 a cut with a cane — according as his deserts were — and 
 taking both in excellent part; learning something in the 
 quiet of the classroom, and still more in the rough-and- 
 tumble of the playground; a dirty, joyous little sprite of 
 the towns, rinding his soul amid the clash of a thousand 
 other little sprites such as himself. 
 
 In the school and in the street he was Ginger shouting 
 Yah! at enemies; playing three-up; hopping in mystic 
 circles chalked upon the pavement; making up to strange 
 men he liked the look of with his 'Ello, Guv'nor! can you 
 give me chyngefor a waistcoat button? — incredibly fearless, 
 cheeky, chivalrous, and quite astonishingly lovable; a 
 gleam in the gray city, a shout of joy amid the murky 
 millions; an adorable little devil with dirty nose and ready 
 fists and shrill battle-cry — bubbling song and spirit, love 
 and war; the policeman his sworn enemy, the parson a 
 somewhat dubious friend. 
 
 That was Teddy Hankey out of doors and at school. 
 
HIS BOYHOOD 29 
 
 When he went home, and the door closed between him 
 and the street, he turned into quite a different creature. 
 All the love and battle faded out of him. He crept up- 
 stairs, washed, brushed, and put on a collar. And with 
 the collar he became a new and quite unnatural boy — 
 something of a saint, and a quite accomplished little liar; 
 who said Yes, aunt, and No, aunt, and was called Edward, 
 and helped to wash up, and was very meek and good and 
 tidy. 
 
 At home the saucy street urchin was pious — because 
 it paid. His aunt told the curate she was very pleased 
 with Edward, bribed him with food to learn his collects, 
 and gave him on his birthday holy little novelettes about 
 tuberculous boys which were issued by religious societies, 
 who made 100 per cent, profit upon them and paid the 
 writers a sweated wage. 
 
 He believed in the Catholic and Apostolic Church 
 before he had lost his first teeth; he renounced the pomps 
 and vanities of this wicked world, when all his wealth 
 consisted of a horse-chestnut on a boot-lace and a stick 
 of grubby toffee; he could tell you the meaning of the 
 Sacrament before he could spell that word aright; and he 
 had hymns and collects innumerable by heart. 
 
 Sunday was the one dark spot in the boy's week. 
 There was no school that day. His aunt took him to 
 church twice in a clean collar, and he had to attend 
 Sunday School morning and afternoon besides. 
 
30 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Soon he became a member of the choir, swung censers, 
 carried banners in processions, and received 6d. a week for 
 his services. 
 
 Teddy lived the double life till he was about fourteen, 
 and took less harm from it than you might have imagined. 
 
 In those years the State drew out his soul and made it 
 sensitive. It taught him to feel and to think. 
 
 At the end of that period it cast out the spirit that it 
 had quickened. 
 
 The boy was chucked on to the street to wrestle as best 
 he might with the old world without, a mysterious new 
 world at the same time seething within him. 
 
 He was growing fast at this time in body and soul, and 
 became suddenly aggressive. He went his own way more 
 at home and abroad; and wore his collar less indoors — 
 even at meals. And he was not so good at washing up the 
 plates as he had been. If he was not actually rude to his 
 aunt, he was at least no longer docile. He refused to 
 learn further collects, saying flippantly he'd learnt 'em all; 
 and one fatal Sunday when his aunt sat down after 
 breakfast as always to hear his Catechism and began: 
 
 "What is your name?" he answered briefly: 
 
 "Ginger." • 
 
 That one word summed up the extent of the catas- 
 trophe and the measure of the moral lapse. 
 
 As his aunt said, it was 'eart-breaking. 
 
HIS BOYHOOD 31 
 
 And after that it was hardly to be wondered at that 
 his connection with the Church terminated suddenly and 
 soon. 
 
 Upon the following saint's day Teddy swung his censer 
 with malice aforethought against the shins of a choir boy 
 who was known to be his mortal enemy. It was not his 
 first offence; and he was ejected summarily from the choir. 
 
 That was his last experience of Church. 
 
 He ran home whistling and told his aunt that his voice 
 had cracked. She looked shocked; but when the curate 
 came next day to inform her how things really lay, she 
 was too genteel to call her nephew a liar, only saying 
 sorrowfully that she had noticed a great going back in 
 Edward of late. 
 
 However, like the practical business woman that she 
 was, now that the State had dropped her nephew, and 
 the Church had kicked him out, she set herself to finding 
 him a job. 
 
 Teddy became an errand boy. His work was to drop 
 typewritten circulars at doors and sometimes stamp 
 envelopes; and his aunt told the curate that her nephew 
 was acting as assistant secretary at the Hammersley 
 Typewriting Office. 
 
 Teddy received five shillings a week for his labours. 
 He gave his aunt three of the five, and spent the rest on 
 fags, sweets, high collars, and dubious sporting prints. 
 
 When he was not smoking, as often as not he had a 
 
32 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 cigarette behind his ear, and was generous in allowing 
 smaller boys not yet of an age to buy smokes of their own 
 a suck at his fag. Purse he had none. His spare cash 
 he carried tied in the end of his handkerchief. 
 
 Then he cheeked his boss and got the sack. At the 
 same time he refused point blank to be confirmed. 
 
 The curate, a rather sensible young man outside his 
 church, advised Miss Hankey to get the boy steady 
 work away from home. 
 
 After some inward struggle she decided to write to the 
 man whose mistress she had been: he was rich and a 
 sleeping partner in several business firms of position. 
 
 He gave her an appointment when his wife was out. 
 She went in her weeds. 
 
 The chuckling rogue entered on her, crisp, pink, impeni- 
 tent as ever, if somewhat balder and more plump. 
 
 "Gad, Nell! you look more damned shocked than 
 ever, " he cried, and twinkled at her through his eyeglass. 
 "You're a strappin' fine gal still, though, I see." 
 
 "I didn't come here to have my past thrown up at me, 
 Mr. Jarvis," trembled the cold, white woman. "I came 
 about my nephew — to ask if you could help him." 
 
 Mr. Jarvis could and did. 
 
 Teddy was given work at Mapleton's, the great leather 
 factory in Mudsey down the river near the docks. 
 
 It was some little way from Lambeth; and the boy went 
 
HIS BOYHOOD 33 
 
 to lodge near his work in a Christian family, carefully 
 selected by his aunt. 
 
 As she wished him good-bye she said she would 
 be glad to see him any supper time on Sunday after service; 
 or if he would call for her at 6:15 she would take him with 
 her to Evensong. 
 
 Then she pecked him coldly and ended: 
 "I hope you'll grow up to be a good man, Edward." 
 "Thank you, aunt," said the youth. "Sime to you, 
 I'm sure. And thank you very much for all your kind- 
 ness. " 
 
 He put his arm about her and kissed her; and then 
 departed down the street with rather tender eyes. 
 
 She had made as good a foster-mother to him as a 
 woman who cannot love can hope to make; and after 
 all it was a parting — after ten years; and she had not 
 been a bad old aunt to him — not by 'alf she 'adn't. 
 
IV 
 HIS YOUTH 
 
 Mudsey was south of the river and east of Tower 
 Bridge; and in Mudsey lived Doctor English. 
 
 He was a big man with tranquil eyes and a high forehead 
 across which ran a great sagacious furrow. With his soft 
 brown beard and slouch hat he looked more like a pioneer 
 than a professional man; and a touch of sun would burn 
 him a deep bronze and add to his South African air. And 
 a pioneer he was — not in the jungles and deserts of 
 savage continents, but in the dark heart of Civilization. 
 You had but to see him without his hat to know that he 
 was not quite the ordinary man. There was something 
 lofty and detached about his face. 
 
 Doctor English was of those who are just one step ahead 
 of their own generation. If he lived to be an old man 
 humanity would have caught him up, and he would die 
 abreast of his times. He was hardly a rebel, and scarcely 
 a prophet; though he had about him enough of both to 
 make him interesting and not quite enough to isolate him. 
 
 All his life he had cherished the ineradicable convic- 
 tion that Something was coming, Something Big and 
 
 34 
 
HIS YOUTH 35 
 
 Beautiful. As a child he had called that Something 
 Christ, learning so to do from his mother whom he loved. 
 
 His father, a successful wholesale chemist without ideals 
 but of conspicuous integrity, had been able to send his son 
 to Cambridge. There the young man had begun to read 
 for Holy Orders, only to find as the new knowledge of the 
 last half of the nineteenth century flooded in upon him 
 that there was no room for his growing soul within the 
 trammels of a church whose philosophy had not changed 
 materially since the days of St. Augustine. 
 
 And so it came about that when he should have been 
 writing essays on the Trinity he was walking the wards of 
 a great London hospital, reading for himself the Book of 
 Life and learning at first-hand of the disease, moral and 
 physical, of the world with which he meant to battle. 
 At the elbows of great surgeons, and the bedsides of dying 
 prostitutes, in the accident ward, the operating theatre, 
 the slums into which his hospital bade him dive to succour 
 travailing women, he learned more perhaps of the Mind 
 of the Maker of it all, His purpose and His practice, than 
 he would have done in the lecture-rooms and chapel of a 
 theological college. 
 
 Doing well at the hospital, he was offered an appoint- 
 ment upon the staff. But Edmund English had the soul 
 of a missionary; and if in those days he possessed any 
 ambition it was political rather than professional. 
 
 The big young man with the brown beard and steady 
 
36 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 eyes left the hospital with a new philosophy and his old 
 faith. 
 
 Something was coming; and It was Big and Beautiful. 
 
 He felt It within him — dim, mysterious : he saw It 
 without him — a gleam here and there lighting the dark- 
 ness; a sense of Dawn more suspected than seen; a 
 hope, a vision, a prophecy. 
 
 When he settled down in Mudsey he no longer called 
 his Something Christ; he spoke of it as Democracy; and 
 he was one of the first of the evolutionary Socialists in the 
 country. 
 
 That was in the early '80's; and Socialism in England, 
 killed for two decades by the Commune and Paris mas- 
 sacre, had not shaken off its catastrophic shackles. 
 
 But young Doctor English settled down to a shilling 
 practice in Mudsey with the intention of making it and 
 the world Socialist in ten years. To that end he wore a 
 red tie and helped to found the Fabian Society. 
 
 At the end of the appointed time, when he was ten years 
 older than he had been at the beginning, he stood for 
 Parliament and polled 800 votes, which was double the 
 number that he had expected. Then when the London 
 County Council came into being he transferred his 
 ambition from Westminster to Spring Gardens, and was 
 Progressive Member for Mudsey just long enough to 
 discover that his talent did not lie in the political arena. 
 
 As the dome of his head began to shine, and the fold 
 
HIS YOUTH 37 
 
 across his forehead to deepen, he wore his red tie less and 
 the quiet light gathered in his eyes. 
 
 But his sense that Something was coming, and that It 
 was Big and Beautiful grew on him and always grew. 
 
 He stood at the window and watched It stealing in dim 
 waves over the waste of house-tops. Edmund English 
 would not live to see anything but a far-off glimmering of 
 It; but It was coming. 
 
 Yes, It was coming — without any help from him: 
 for It was in the air, creeping on over the world, a great 
 tide that none could stay. 
 
 When Socialism became so respectable that church 
 conferences discussed it, Doctor English felt that he could 
 leave the leading and devote himself henceforth to the 
 building up of the souls of individuals in satisfactory 
 bodies. 
 
 And his touch here was very sure; for he was a born doc- 
 tor of flesh and spirit; and the Church had lost in him a 
 great asset. 
 
 But his approach to the human soul was personal and 
 physiological rather than ecclesiastical. 
 
 If there was much of the missionary about him there 
 was nothing of the priest. He moved as a man among 
 men, and was no conscious saviour of souls. 
 
 Doctor English believed with passion in the spiritual 
 equality of all men, while he admitted their intellectual 
 
38 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 distinctions. The barrier of class did not exist for him. 
 He spoke to every man, soul to soul. For him mankind 
 was one in essence and differentiated only by accidents. 
 
 It was no wonder that Mudsey loved him; and that his 
 photograph was to be found in all sorts of strange dens in 
 that reeking quarter by the river. 
 
 When Doctor English resigned his County Council 
 work, he and the sister, with whom he lived, started a 
 night school for boys over fourteen. 
 
 The school was open for two hours a night three nights 
 a week. Down a dim alley off Farthing Lane poured the 
 young rowdies of Mudsey into a little bare room where 
 their souls were burnished and their feet planted in the way. 
 
 Doctor English ran his school on characteristically un- 
 orthodox lines. 
 
 "What d'you teach 'em?" asked a friend. 
 
 "Mostly nowt," replied the big doctor. "We get 'em 
 in off the streets." 
 
 The doctor somewhat exaggerated his practice of 
 negation. But in truth he was his boys' best education; 
 though they did not know it, neither did he. They fed 
 upon his personality, inhaled his goodness, and grew in 
 body and spirit on the sustenance received from his big 
 laugh, his bass voice, the sway of his great shoulders, the 
 friendship deep and splendid in his eye, the manhood of 
 his hand-grip, and that huge Hullo! of his. 
 
HIS YOUTH 39 
 
 For the rest he boxed with his boys, wrestled with them, 
 and taught them gymnastics and Swedish exercises. He 
 performed minor miracles upon their bodies, and roused 
 their swift young souls to an astonished sense of the won- 
 der of mere living. He bought them penny whistles and 
 taught them to play "Three Blind Mice" in parts. A 
 visitor would often see the great doctor in his shirt- 
 sleeves marching round the room piping for his life, a 
 ragged tail of the rats of Mudsey frisking at his heels with 
 swollen cheeks and busy fingers, their eyes intent and 
 hearts in heaven. 
 
 "The unp'yed piper of Mudsey," a flippant lady friend 
 called him. 
 
 Miss English did not entirely approve of her brother's 
 scholastic methods or lack of them. A woman of charac- 
 ter and principle, radiating efficiency and common-sense 
 from behind her high perched pince-nez, she believed very 
 much in definite instruction and most of all in sound 
 church teaching. 
 
 A convinced Imperialist, she was mildly military in her 
 own pedagogic methods. With a tap of her pointing rod 
 upon the floor she would recall to herself the attention of 
 her reluctant class, whose erring eyes wandered too often 
 to Doctor English initiating luckier pals into the mysteries 
 of the half-Nelson, or Cumberland back-heel in the corner. 
 She instructed the boys in history, ancient and modern, 
 while she pointed frequently to a red-splotched map of the 
 
40 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 British Empire that hung upon the wall; she taught them 
 patriotic songs; lectured them on their morals and their 
 manners; read Bible stories to them with comments, 
 pointed and personal; and was altogether too good for 
 them to be very popular. In these matters, as in most, 
 she was free to go her own way; but it was a standing 
 grievance with her that Doctor English would not allow 
 religion to be taught in his school. 
 
 "Can you teach religion?" he would ask in his exasper- 
 atingly mild way, when heckled on the point. 
 
 Miss English was the Martha of Mudsey. 
 
 Determined and dogmatic, capable and practical to a 
 degree, she ran boot-clubs, directed the Country Holiday 
 Fund, managed the managers of the Sunday School, 
 organized the vicar, administrated the parish nurse, and 
 visited the Workhouse. Her sturdy figure and short 
 workmanlike skirt, astonishingly trim, were to be seen at 
 all hours of the day and night flitting in and out of noisome 
 human burrows, hunting down alleys, standing at dark 
 doors. 
 
 The poor of Mudsey did not love her as they loved her 
 brother; they could not take her in as they could him — 
 she was too critical. But the best of them respected her; 
 and when they were in trouble went to her before the vicar. 
 
 An earnest woman, very religious in her limited way, 
 she brought into her brother's life a steadying balance, a 
 
HIS YOUTH 41 
 
 critical element, his large and unsuspicious nature needed 
 in a world that is wideawake to those who can be preyed 
 upon. There were poor men in Mudsey who remembered 
 still the glorious days when the young doctor came 
 among them with no sister to guard his time and purse. 
 All that had been changed since the advent of Miss 
 English. She protected her brother from himself and 
 others. . 
 
 A strong conservative and church-woman, she had for 
 her brother's Socialism a somewhat irritated toleration, 
 excusing it on the ground that Edmund was a dreamer and 
 didn't matter. 
 
 The pair, secure and solid in their middle-class comfort, 
 stood amidst the wind-blown workers of Mudsey, whom 
 any gust might trundle to the brink of the Abyss, like 
 deep-rooted trees in the whirl of autumn leaves. 
 
 When Teddy Hankey went to live in Mudsey he came 
 into contact with Doctor English and his sister through the 
 night school. 
 
 This man and woman laid their cool fingers on the lad 
 and calmed the fever in his blood. In their firm and 
 capable hands body and mind settled down to the quiet 
 business of living. Teddy began to find his feet. The 
 troubles of the boy were passing; the troubles of the man 
 were still far. This was that bright breathing space which 
 comes in the life of many a worker before he has begun to 
 
42 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 feel the weight of the fabric that rests upon his shoulders 
 and is crushing him to earth. 
 
 There was no more regular attendant at the night 
 school than Teddy. He had no inordinate desire for 
 knowledge; but he loved the doctor with the passion of 
 fifteen, and liked to spar with Miss English, who was as 
 combative as himself. 
 
 Teddy's reaction against what he called religion had by 
 no means spent itself as yet. 
 
 "HTm a h' atheist," he was fond of affirming cheerfully 
 at this time. "I don't care," and swaggered recklessly 
 down the street, conscious that in cheeking the Almighty 
 he was earning some just reputation for hardihood 
 among his mates. 
 
 At the same time he painted texts zealously on Sundays 
 till he was past seventeen; and joined with gusto in the 
 hymns that Doctor English led. 
 
 Freethinker as he alleged himself to be, the lad in his 
 less militant moments would admit of Doctor English to 
 a pal. 
 
 "I like to hear 'im jawin' about oP Jesus." 
 
 One great event happened in the life of each of Doctor 
 English's boys while he was at the school. 
 
 At some time or other, sooner rather than later, he went 
 by appointment to see the doctor in his study alone. 
 
HIS YOUTH 43 
 
 On these occasions the doctor preached on an ancient 
 
 text: 
 
 "The Wages of Sin is Death." 
 
 But it was not the ordinary sort of sermon. It was very- 
 simple, very direct, and couched in the homely language 
 of every day. 
 
 The word Sin was not mentioned. God, the Devil, 
 Heaven and Hell were not introduced. If it was a ser- 
 mon at all it was the sermon of the Future — scientific 
 rather than sacerdotal, very human, and shot with smiles. 
 
 And the wonder of it was that no boy knew he had been 
 sermonized at all. He only knew that a flood of healing 
 light had been poured in upon the dark places of his life. 
 
 To him it was a plain talk by a man on a subject usually 
 discussed by boys alone in alleys and dark corners along 
 Mudsey Wall. 
 
 That visit to the doctor was one of the most memorable 
 incidents in Teddy's life. He remembered it always — 
 the quiet, comfortable, airy room, the doctor's bald head 
 and steady eyes, the green shade of the lamp, the quiet 
 voice and occasional ripple of laughter. 
 
 The doctor talked to him simply and naturally about 
 his body, its nature, how to control, and why to control it, 
 and the consequences of lack of control. He showed him 
 a few pictures, patted him on the back, and shook him by 
 the hand. 
 
 Teddy departed with uplifted heart. 
 
44 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 A younger pal, not yet initiated, was waiting him out- 
 side. 
 
 " What's he tell you?" he asked eagerly. 
 
 "Why, tells you not to make a blimey fool o' yourself," 
 answered Teddy, frank and flippant. 
 
 The other scoffed. 
 
 "And didn't you know that afore?" he asked. 
 
 "You shut your 'ead," retorted Teddy, "or I'll shut 
 it for you. " 
 
 At eighteen Teddy left the school perforce, and passed 
 out into the world. 
 
 "We can only try to set 'em on their feet," said Doctor 
 English. 
 
 And often it was enough. 
 
 Many the Mudsey boy he had steered safely through 
 the shoals, quicksands, and foundering deeps of the transi- 
 tion sea that separates the boy from the man; and Teddy 
 Hankey was of that number. 
 
HIS MANHOOD 
 
 Teddy Hankey was now grown up. 
 
 A small man and a cockey with a very pretty wit, he 
 walked swiftly on thin bowed legs, his shoulders rather 
 round, his elbows rather out, and amused blue eyes, 
 bright as a bird's, peeping here and there and everywhere. 
 
 His brain was as sharp as a needle, and not much more 
 massive. 
 
 And there was something fiercely spiritual about him. 
 
 With his flaming hair and bright blue eyes he looked 
 like a figure stepped down from a picture by a Primitive 
 on the walls of the National Gallery and walking the 
 streets of London in dittoes. 
 
 He was essentially a child of the towns, a creature of 
 to-day — this red-headed wisp of a man, brilliant in his 
 way; ecstatic, erratic, swift and uncertain, a promise 
 rather than a performance. 
 
 Centuries stood between him and the dull stolidity of 
 his Sussex forbears, their big bone, slow minds and mas- 
 sive animality. 
 
 Teddy Hankey was the chrysalis man of our day. 
 
 45 
 
46 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The earth-crawling caterpillar was dead; and the butterfly 
 had not yet emerged. 
 
 Teddy had his mother's eyes, but shot with surreptitious 
 laughter; and in repose his face was anxious, but otherwise 
 spirited and full of fire. 
 
 Nimble in wit and limb, there was about him that 
 little touch of flippancy, of almost foreign gaiety, that is 
 the mark of the young men of the towns to-day. 
 
 Anybody less akin to the John Bull of history and tra- 
 dition it would be hard to conceive. 
 
 Beef and beer had not gone to his making. He was 
 compact of jam, fried fish, and peppermint. 
 
 Whether for that reason or a better, he possessed in no 
 means that divine gift of imagination which perhaps more 
 than any other distinguishes the worker in the city from 
 the labourer in the country. He was emotional, enthusi- 
 astic, of April moods and impulses, liable to deep depres- 
 sions and strange exaltations. Cocky and courageous, he 
 was a bounder of the class that can bound without offence, 
 because it is so clearly their nature so to do. 
 
 His work was steady; and he was earning good money. 
 He had nothing to fear and not very much to be ashamed 
 of. London was his world; and it was a good world. He 
 followed its politics, its recreations, and above all its 
 crimes with gusto. There were a lot of men and women 
 about. Some of them were rich; some of them were poor; 
 most of them were funny, and a good few were his friends. 
 
HIS MANHOOD 47 
 
 Life for him at present was a peep-show and a panto- 
 mime. He walked through it briskly, winking confiden- 
 tially at one, shouting What ho! at another, and spitting 
 freely on the pavements. 
 
 Owing to the happy chance that he owned an aunt who 
 had been the mistress of a gentleman, he was enabled to 
 pass from boy to man in the same occupation. He knew 
 nothing of that fatal lapse which comes for most Mudsey 
 men as the brief and busy period of boyhood tails off into 
 the desultory and disintegrating labour of the casual 
 waterside worker. 
 
 Mapleton's heavy leather works were the biggest in the 
 metropolis and perhaps in the world. In them the whole 
 process of manufacture from the liming of the raw hides 
 to currying the leather for the finished article was carried 
 out. Beginning as a boy, glue-bashing behind a beam- 
 man in the pits, Teddy, a sharp lad, rose methodically, till 
 he reached the splitting shed. 
 
 Thus placed by circumstance well above the class which 
 has to sneak and cadge and lie to live, he could afford to 
 tell the truth and be respectable; and he made the most of 
 his rare opportunities. 
 
 The fear of unemployment did not haunt him: he was 
 young, fairly strong — save for a cough which bothered 
 him in winter — and above all a bachelor, and determined 
 to remain so. 
 
48 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 When asked if he was married he would answer with 
 scorn: 
 
 "No fear!" 
 
 In those days he lived like a king and could well afford 
 to. He was earning quite as much money as was good for 
 him; had a room to himself, and a landlady who spoiled 
 him. His finger-tips were brown with rolling fags: for 
 he never smoked a pipe; and he owned a pair of buttoned 
 boots with patent-leather toes. 
 
 As often as not he wore a collar even on a week day and 
 on holidays a tie-pin. 
 
 Many people mistook him for a clerk. 
 
 Certainly Abraham Boniface would not have recog- 
 nized his grandson for blood of his. 
 
 Like most of his class he had no so-called religion, and 
 never went near a parson. 
 
 When he left the school at Farthing Lane, a mate at the 
 works, at the instigation of Miss English, had tried to in- 
 duce him to join a men's club run by a University Mission. 
 
 Teddy had met his friend's blandishments with a firm, 
 "Not me." 
 
 No more religion for him. He'd been in religion when 
 he was a kid, and knew all about that, thank ye. Religion 
 was all right as a livin'; but where's the sense in it for 
 chaps? — unless you're out of work. And Teddy didn't 
 mean to be out of work. Therefore he could afford to be 
 independent. 
 
HIS MANHOOD 49 
 
 Iustead of going to church, or attending church clubs, 
 he read the Clarion and scoffed at its scoffings; for the 
 genial skepticism of the towns was his in full. 
 
 A parson was to him a standing joke; and he rarely- 
 passed one by without winking to himself or nudging the 
 companion he was with. 
 
 On Sunday afternoon, his carroty hair and spirited blue 
 eyes might often he seen in a crowd about a stump, as he 
 heckled a preacher and asked blasphemous questions. 
 
 Yet if he was not religious he was on the whole a far 
 better man than his churchgoing ancestors, though the 
 fear of Hell was no longer before his eyes. His talk if 
 slangy was fairly clean. And while he was fond of chaffing 
 women he never harmed them. It may be that the strain 
 of gentler blood he inherited from his mother kept him 
 straight; it may be that his vitality was somewhat less than 
 that of his mates. Certainly he had far fewer lady friends 
 than most of his peers. 
 
 As a set-off against this, and to avoid the reproach of 
 being good, he played the sporting blood with the furious 
 zeal of the cockney, and earned enough reputation in the 
 part to carry him through and atone for his idiosyncrasy. 
 
 He knew by heart the history and achievements of 
 most of the big fighting men and athletes of his day. 
 Some he had seen at the halls — strong men, wrestling 
 men, acrobats; the pictures of others, huge-shouldered 
 beasts, crouching for a spring, adorned his room. He 
 
50 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 could patter the racy lingo of the ring with the best, and 
 was on nodding terms with half-a-dozen shaven-headed, 
 blue-chinned young ruffians who pushed mud peacefully 
 all the week for the Borough and used their dukes more or 
 less professionally on the Sabbath. 
 
 At some peril to himself, by reason of possible police- 
 raids, he haunted ill-lit rooms and watched two half- 
 naked men bash each other on the snout with a violence 
 varying in its degree with the purse put up. 
 
 At one such encounter he was so fortunate as to have a 
 spot of blood fall upon his cuff. That shirt remained 
 jealously unwashed for weeks. He wore it Sunday after 
 Sunday with protruding cuff. In a mysterious and 
 frowning silence he gathered about him a little band of 
 conspirators, lead them down Mudsey Wall, and in a 
 secret archway there discovered to them the sign and seal 
 of his maturity. He was blooded: a man. 
 
 Once he was privileged to see a woman with her hands 
 tied behind her worrying rats upon her knees. This was 
 at the height of his romantic period. A little later he 
 kept a bulldog in a backyard, to Miss English's disgust. 
 He did not like the bulldog much; but he liked the swag- 
 ger of him, especially on Sunday when he took B. P., 
 mildest of dogs, out for a walk upon a chain and met Miss 
 English on the way to church, who refused to acknowledge 
 him. After six months the bulldog died. Teddy was 
 relieved, but lost in gloom, and suspected poison — 
 
HIS MANHOOD 51 
 
 without cause. The incident, mysterious as it seemed, 
 gave him distinction for a time among his mates, and 
 when it was known that he would never keep another, 
 that his 'eart was fair broke, and that he would not have 
 taken a hundred quid for his favourite who was not worth 
 as many shillings, the women too regarded him with 
 favourable interest. 
 
 At this period of his career you might often see him 
 at street corners, his eyes furtive and watchful for Doctor 
 English, hobnobbing with bookmakers. Every now and 
 then upon a Saturday he attended a race-meeting and 
 squandered his savings there; and once on his way home 
 from Kempton he got mildly drunk. 
 
 Miss English, who heard all things, came round to see 
 him next day in the lodgings in which she had planted him 
 after he had removed himself from the Christian family 
 provided for him by his aunt. 
 
 "What's this I hear?" she said severely. 
 
 Teddy could lie to Miss English with ease and gusto, 
 but not to her brother. 
 
 He faced her now fearlessly. 
 
 "What, Miss?" 
 
 "You!" said the solid woman. "Saturday?" 
 
 The other's ingenuous blue eyes were wide, his young 
 face earnest. Anybody but Miss English might have 
 been taken in. 
 
 " I don't know nothin' about nothin, ' Miss. " 
 
52 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "You do! In Java Street. Drunk. Beastly." 
 
 Teddy hung his head appropriately. It was clearly a 
 waste of time and talents to he further. 
 
 "I may have made a little mistake, Miss, " he muttered. 
 "Come from me bein' teetotal. Two pennorth done it," 
 
 "It comes from your never going to church from year's 
 end to year's end," the other answered severely. "What 
 else can you expect?" He stood before her downcast for 
 the sake of decency. "Of course I shall tell the doctor." 
 
 Teddy spurted into sudden life. 
 
 "That you won't, Miss!" he cried, and, brushing fiercely 
 past her, he darted down the street. 
 
 Five minutes later he stood in the doctor's study, wring- 
 ing his cap and confessing his sin. 
 
 The big man looked gloomy as a mountain in mist. 
 
 "I've heard all about it, Hankey," he said. 
 
 The little cockney flared white. 
 
 "Hankey is it, sir? Hankey!" he snorted. 
 
 The other ignored him. 
 
 "It's being in with those bookies," he said. "I know. 
 I've known all along." 
 
 He went to the window and stood there. 
 
 "Is it the first time?" he asked at length. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 The doctor swung slowly round. 
 
 "Is it the last time?" 
 
 "Yes, sir," 
 
HIS MANHOOD 53 
 
 The big man strode heavily to the door and opened it. 
 "Get out, you ass!" he said briefly. 
 Teddy went, drooping and dumb; and as he did so the 
 doctor gave him his hand. 
 
 Two days later he heard a voice behind him in the street. 
 
 "Hullo, Ted." 
 
 "Hullo, sir." 
 
 Doctor English, gravely smiling, dismounted from his 
 bicycle. 
 
 "Miss English says you must go to church or get 
 married, " he announced. 
 
 Then he mounted and wheeled slowly away. 
 
 "All right, sir," cried Teddy cockily. "You know 
 which." 
 
VI 
 
 HIS MARRIAGE 
 
 At a discreetly later age than most of his mates, Teddy 
 Hankey fell in love. 
 
 The girl's name was Louie Lapwing. She was of his 
 own social standing — that is to say, well above the class 
 of girl whose only obvious relaxation is immorality. 
 
 Both her father and mother had been in service and 
 died young. Their little daughter had been brought up 
 by a respectable old publican, her uncle. He too had 
 died, but not till he had seen his niece established in a good 
 position as a bodice-embroiderer in a workship in Mudsey. 
 There she earned wages ample enough to give her a bed- 
 room to herself, innocent pleasures and a chance to live as 
 ninety-nine women out of every hundred would live 
 granted the opportunity. 
 
 Louie Lapwing was a class above the average Mudsey 
 girl who worked in a jam factory and earned her lis. a 
 week when in full work. Her wages were better, and her 
 standard of life higher. She dressed more simply and in 
 better taste. There was not a touch of the tawdry about 
 her. Her brown hair swept simply back from her fore- 
 
 54 
 
HIS MARRIAGE 55 
 
 head was never in curling pins. The rows of mock pearls, 
 the flimsy ornaments, the hair arranged in that crisp curled 
 fashion, close to the head with tight little plaits and a 
 ripple at the forehead and above each ear, that gives her 
 half -barbarous charm of the filly at a fair to the cockney 
 girl, were not for her. 
 
 She looked like a lady's maid, and dressed like one. No 
 man had ever taken liberties with her or offered to. Her 
 atmosphere and not her tongue was her protection. She 
 stood somewhat apart. And the young men of Mudsey 
 felt it and left her alone. 
 
 Yet with her swimming dimple in either cheek, her soft 
 eyes, her healthy pallor, and her gentle smiling air, not 
 belied by that firm mouth of hers, there were few sweeter 
 women to be seen south of the river. 
 
 Teddy Hankey at least recognized it; and it was not 
 long before he could give out that he was suited at last. 
 And there was never anything more simple or more fair 
 than that Mudsey sweethearting. Both were gentle; 
 both were pure. Once she went to his room and sat 
 upon his bed while he watched her from the window with 
 shy, happy eyes. He never went to hers; but more than 
 once when the few grimy laburnums in Mudsey had 
 broken into lovely and surprising sprays of green, she 
 found her room sweet with violets when she returned from 
 work. 
 
 The young couple liked to get away from the traffic and 
 
56 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 the lamps and to walk down narrow Mudsey Wall at 
 night between high dark warehouses with peeps of the 
 river shining and swirling through archways and along 
 wharf-sides, the moon glimmering down from a watery 
 waste over tall chimneys and tumbling roofs. 
 
 In an opening in Mudsey Wall some steps, crowded 
 between two warehouses, led down to the river. At the 
 foot of them the receding tide would leave a patch of wet 
 shingle. From it a rough stone-way dipped into the 
 water, marking the spot where of old, before the sepulchral 
 array of warehouses had risen on the bank, a ferry had 
 plied across the river to Wapping on the north bank. 
 
 On this tiny streak of shore the two passed many a deep 
 and silent hour. 
 
 Here the river lived and loved beside them as they 
 twined their arms and wreathed their spirits. Sitting 
 on the stone-way, cheek on cheek, shoulder to shoulder, 
 they would watch it in a hush of happy tears. 
 
 And in that quiet corner, the river slipping in and out 
 of his mind and the memories with it, the sounds of 
 the phantom city going down in darkness for miles all 
 about them, he told the woman he loved truthfully of 
 his life. 
 
 "I ain't been much," he said. "But I been straight." 
 And for some reason there were tears in his voice as he 
 said it. 
 
 "I'm sure you have, Ted," replied the girl at his side, 
 
HIS MARRIAGE 57 
 
 and added with the beautiful simplicity of her class, 
 "So'vel." 
 
 He told her what he remembered of his childhood and 
 his mother, describing her face as he had seen it looking 
 out of the cab at him. 
 
 " That's the last I see of mother, " he said. 
 
 He stood beneath a warehouse under a desolate silver- 
 dappled sky, the broad satin-like riband of river swift and 
 darkling at his feet, and beyond it tall forest chimneys 
 rising out of a dense undergrowth of dwarf houses. 
 
 She looked up at him in awe. 
 
 "Where is she now?" 
 
 "I don't know. 
 
 "Is she alive?" 
 
 " Can't say . . . Aunt never mentioned. " 
 
 A dim sense of the horror of it, the loneliness, the love- 
 lessness, here amid these crowding millions, this man who 
 knew nothing of his mother's fate, that mother who knew 
 nothing of her son's, stole in upon the young woman's 
 mothering heart. 
 
 She pressed her lover's arm. 
 
 "I expect she loved you, Ted." 
 
 Old dim emotions stirred him. 
 
 "Very like," he answered huskily. 
 
 " I expect it tore her. " 
 
 He nodded, his gaze held by the slipping waters at his 
 feet. 
 
58 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "I can see her eyes now. 'Meet me at the river/ 
 mother says. " 
 
 They climbed the steps and reentered Mudsey Wall 
 arm in arm; and she was crying. 
 
 "It wasn't the Workhouse they took her to?" she asked, 
 low. 
 
 She felt him stiffen beneath her hand. 
 
 "No," he said, and touched his forehead. "Up here!" 
 
 She dried her eyes. 
 
 "Strange her going like that." 
 
 "It was dad's death," he answered. "That fair broke 
 her up." 
 
 "He must have been a good man for her to take on like 
 that." 
 
 She looked up at him with shining eyes. 
 
 "Yes, he was good," he said, and added in his swift 
 ecstatic way, "My h'eye! he wasn't half a man neether. 
 See him when he wash isself o' Sunday. Sich arms and 
 legs on him. Only wish I took after 'im. I'm mother's 
 son. Aunt Eleanor always says that. " 
 
 He took her to see his aunt. 
 
 "She's a card," whispered Teddy, as he knocked. 
 "That's what she is — a fair card. Yet she wasn't a bad 
 oP aunt to me except only when she was carryin' on about 
 conversion or spittin' out collects. " 
 
 Teddy found his aunt older, gentler, and somehow 
 rather pathetic. There was something about Loo that 
 
HIS MARRIAGE 59 
 
 seemed to thaw the cold white woman. She grew 
 almost warm. After supper, when Teddy was upstairs 
 in the attic looking through a box of oddments his 
 aunt had kept for him, she talked to the girl of Edward 
 almost with affection as she did her immaculate Sunday 
 crotchet work with needles as cold and bony as 
 herself. 
 
 "Edward's very like his mother, but more spirited," 
 she said. 
 
 "Is she alive?" asked the girl shyly. 
 
 "No. She died ten years ago — in the asylum. I 
 didn't tell Edward. She wore away all to nothing. It 
 was consumption in the end. She was just all eyes and a 
 skeleton. " 
 
 At parting she gave the girl a kiss and said to Teddy: 
 
 "Take care of her." 
 
 To Loo she said, 
 
 "Mind his chest; and don't let him worry." 
 
 Then she stood in the door and followed the young 
 couple down the street with rather wistful eyes. 
 
 At the corner they turned, and she waved at them. 
 
 "Well, I never!" said Teddy in subdued voice. "Quite 
 changed. " 
 
 In fact the cold white woman was dying of cancer. No- 
 body knew it but her doctor and herself, for she had the 
 qualities of her defects; and if she could not love she 
 could at least endure. 
 
60 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 A few weeks later when she died Teddy felt it more 
 than he would have conceived possible. 
 
 She was the last of his relations; and he was fond of 
 saying that he had no friends — but Doctor English. 
 
 The doctor's old boys always brought their sweethearts 
 to him to be approved; and Teddy was no exception to the 
 rule. 
 
 The big man gazed at the young couple with those deep 
 laughing eyes of his. 
 
 "There's only one thing I've got against it," he said. 
 "She's too good for you, Teddy." 
 
 Teddy was always at his best with the doctor. 
 
 "That's what they all say, sir," he smiled. 
 
 "Only me," interjected Loo. 
 
 Miss English held up a warning finger. 
 
 "Hush!" she said; and they all laughed. 
 
 The doctor's final advice to Loo was that she should 
 make Teddy wear flannel next his skin; his sister's that 
 she should induce him to join a Friendly Society. 
 
 "It's the best form of insurance for a workingman," 
 she said, practical even in love affairs. "Are you going 
 to be married in church?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, Miss," said Teddy, somewhat shocked. 
 
 "I'm glad to hear it," retorted Miss English in her tart 
 way. "I thought you were all against the Church." 
 
 "Oh, no, Miss. Not for marrying and burying and 
 
HIS MARRIAGE 61 
 
 that," replied Teddy. "Must do it proper while you're 
 at it." 
 
 Anti-clerical though Teddy posed as being, it would 
 never have occurred to him not to be married by the 
 Church: for it was correct in his class and added a certain 
 touch of social distinction; and Teddy was quite gentleman 
 enough to be a snob. 
 
 Doctor English and his sister attended the wedding. 
 
 "A gentle creature," said the doctor opening his um- 
 brella in the porch, as the hansom with the young couple 
 in it swung out of sight. 
 
 "Yes. Plenty of character though," replied his sister, 
 pressing her lips characteristically. "She'll rule that 
 roost — when she's found him out — and he'll never know 
 it." 
 
 The doctor chuckled slyly. 
 
 " Like some one else. " 
 
 She tapped his arm. 
 
 "Now!" she said, and tucking up her skirt stepped out 
 into the wet. 
 
vn 
 
 HIS HONEYMOON 
 
 Teddy took his bride to Victoria in a hansom. 
 
 "Ain't married every day," he said. "Splash about a 
 bit for once in your life. " 
 
 Loo sat and dimpled at his side. 
 
 Teddy bubbled over with the joy of life. 
 
 "All right, ain't it?" he chirped, taking off his hat to 
 every woman in a passing cab who struck his fancy. 
 
 "Chuck it, Teddy," giggled Loo. "They'll be after 
 you." 
 
 "Let 'em," said Teddy. "I love 'em all." His arm 
 stole about her, and his smiling blue eyes peeped into hers. 
 "Only I love you best." 
 
 At Victoria he gave the bag that was their only luggage 
 to a porter. 
 
 "Can't you carry it yourself then?" laughed Loo. 
 
 "Not me," said Teddy. "I'm on me 'oneymoon. 
 Besides, people in our stytion of life must give employ- 
 ment to the lower classes. They look to us, pore chaps." 
 
 He took their tickets to Hazelhurst in Sussex, the home 
 of his fathers. 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 63 
 
 "What class?" asked the porter. 
 
 "First, o' course," said Teddy. "I'd ha* taken a 
 Pullman's — only there ain't one on the tryne." 
 
 "You're like a lord, you are," said Loo. 
 
 "Well, I got the dibs, ain't I, duckie?" he retorted. 
 "Mayn't I blow 'em a bit on me bride then?" 
 
 He gave the porter sixpence. The man touched his hat 
 and turned away with a covert grin, and a "Thank you, 
 sir." 
 
 "Sir!" whispered Teddy. "D'you hear that? Sir! 
 He thinks I'm Lord 'Yzelhurst goin' down to me country 
 plyce with Lydy Mybel on me arm. " 
 
 Job Boniface had left Hazelhurst on foot; Ted Hankey 
 returned by train. 
 
 The young couple alighted at the little wayside station 
 amid the woods and fields of the Sussex Weald. 
 
 As the train rumbled away into the distance, seem- 
 ing to carry with it the noise and smoke and stir of 
 the great city from which it had emerged an hour 
 ago, Teddy followed it almost wistfully as though it were 
 a friend. 
 
 He stood on the platform alone with his bride beneath 
 the sky and listened to the silence. 
 
 He was a strangely different creature from the man who 
 had plodded out of Hazelhurst thirty years before with his 
 
64 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 chequered handkerchief upon his back, the clay upon his 
 boots, and Teddy Hankey inchoate in his blood. 
 
 The old carter with the stiff frill of beard standing in the 
 door of the Cock Inn would never have recognized in this 
 pallid, sprightly little fellow who emerged from the station 
 the son of his old friend and mate, Job Boniface. 
 
 " Sye ! " called Teddy. " Is this the wye to ' Yzelhurst? " 
 
 The other blinked slow eyes. 
 
 "Haazelurrsd? " he cawed in his undulating nasal Sussex 
 speech, very slow and sleepy. 
 
 "' Yzelhurst !" reiterated the cockney, sharp and snappy. 
 
 The carter shook his head. 
 
 "Caa'n't say to be sure," he drawled. "I expagt it 
 might be. " 
 
 He put his clay pipe back in his mouth, lifted his face, 
 and puffed. The chap was some sort of foreigner, he 
 reckoned. 
 
 Teddy turned on his way. 
 
 "Funny talk," he muttered scornfully, and called back, 
 " I suppose you can't speak English or understand it then. " 
 
 The young couple took the road that waved away before 
 them across the wooded Weald, at the top of each rise a 
 peep of blue hills rising like a wall between them and 
 infinity. 
 
 "They'd be the Downs," said Teddy in hushed voice. 
 "I've heard father talk o' them many a time." 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 65 
 
 So he tripped in thin boots down the road his wooden- 
 footed forefathers had slouched along for centuries 
 behind miry beasts or laden carts — a dapper little man, 
 titupping along under the vast sky, his narrow-brimmed 
 billy-cock thrust on the back of his head. A cigarette was 
 in his mouth, and his head was high and alert. It was 
 clear that he was a little bit on the defensive — a stranger 
 in a far land with a woman on his arm. 
 
 A sign-post pointed them down a rambling country 
 lane. They walked between high hedges, the broad road- 
 side lush with September herbage. Here and there a 
 timbered farm stood back from the roadside amid stacks. 
 Red and white beasts grazed in the fields and gazed. From 
 low lying reed beds came weird croakings; and once a swift 
 brown bird trailed a long tail across the road before them. 
 
 Out of the green an embankment lifted its long un- 
 natural parapet like a wall made by man to stem the tides 
 of Nature. Along the level top of it every now and then 
 strings of horseless carriages glided, smooth and swift, 
 some with faces at the windows, some tarpaulin-covered, 
 some laden with coal. It was the modern man's great 
 highway, massive, shining, metal-shod, more amazing far 
 than any Roman road, running across marsh and weald, 
 spanning rivers, piercing forests, burrowing through 
 mountains — level as water, straight as a spear, smooth 
 as ice: the link of steel that joins city to city, nation to 
 nation, sea to sea, and man to man. 
 
66 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 In the dissipating town Teddy had never noticed the 
 trains and the wonder of them. There they seemed 
 f amiliar, inevitable, a rumbling part of the rumbling whole, 
 a cog in the great machine, smoky, noisy, swift, amid 
 smoke and noise and speed. Here, in the silence under the 
 huge heaven, amid birds and woods and the slow elemen- 
 tal life that had been from the Beginning, this busy white- 
 maned monster that man had recently created after seons 
 of struggle, failure, and tears, to take the place of the old- 
 fashioned horse, struck him strangely. 
 
 He stopped and stared open-mouthed like a child, his 
 hand on Loo's arm. 
 
 It was almost as though he were afraid. 
 
 A great hush had fallen on the hearts of both. Wall- 
 bound from birth, for the first time perhaps a sense of the 
 immensity of all things and their own most humbling 
 littleness, the huge silence and mystery of Space and 
 Time, seized their souls, and opened their awed eyes to the 
 meaning and miracle of life, as they trudged along to- 
 gether under the gray sky, two trifling atoms suddenly 
 insignificant even to themselves and dumfounded because 
 of it. 
 
 Deeper and deeper they plunged into this still fairy- 
 land of dreams and mystic cows and trees that sang. 
 
 Suddenly in the silence a bell tinkled behind them. 
 
 They turned to find a motor 'bus bearing down on them. 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 67 
 
 It was as though the Spirit of the Present had dogged 
 them here as they stepped back into the Past, following 
 them from the towns, hunting them down amid those 
 wild honeysuckled lanes. 
 
 Teddy drew up in the ditch and watched it with amaze- 
 ment. 
 
 It looked so strange here in the trough of the quiet lane, 
 this familiar tramp of the London streets with its gaudy 
 advertisements, its crowded roof, its little composed pilot 
 behind his wheel guiding its unwieldy bulk as it glided in 
 swift ease along the way up which in the past groaning 
 ox teams, sweating pack horses, even screaming slaves, 
 had laboured under the lash. 
 
 "I wonder what they'd say if they saw that," mused 
 Teddy, his eyes on the conductor of the vanishing 'bus, 
 his mind in the past. " Make some of 'em stare, I'll lay. 
 Just runs itself with a man at the wheel. No horses, no 
 sweat, no nothing. " 
 
 Where four roads met they asked an old woman the 
 way. 
 
 She directed them up a steep bridle-lane that led past a 
 black barn. 
 
 On the brow they came to a timbered cottage, the roof 
 of it red with a glory of dying ampelopsis. 
 
 A comely middle-aged woman in a mutch cap was 
 drawing water from a well. 
 
68 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Beg pardon. Is this Yewtree Cottage?" asked 
 Teddy. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "We're the 'Ankeys," said Teddy — "from London. 
 This is my wife. " 
 
 The woman greeted them with smiles. 
 
 She knew nothing of them save as a young couple who 
 had written to her for rooms. 
 
 It was one of those shining white Septembers when the 
 merry robins sing all day. 
 
 The pair had a room in the roof that looked out over a 
 tiny lawn, an old cactus tree, green fields where cows 
 munched under still oaks, and a glimpse of the Downs 
 rising like a mystic tapestry interwoven of amethyst, 
 purple, blue, and green, behind the solemn trees. 
 
 The floor of their room waved up and down; a great 
 black beam ran across the ceiling; and there was no handle 
 to the door, but a queer latch with a piece of string 
 attached. 
 
 It was a little old cottage bowed beneath its weight of 
 years and heavy Sussex slabs and half -tiled to the roof; 
 and there was a wild back garden in which red dahlias 
 and French beans ran glorious riot. 
 
 The sound of milking woke them every morning. 
 
 The young couple would lie awake in the silence of those 
 splendid dawns, the sun pouring in on them, and listen to 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 69 
 
 the robins singing and the hum of a thrashing machine, 
 which Teddy declared to be the noise of the world going 
 round. 
 
 "Only you can't hear it in London, cause o* the traffic 
 and that." 
 
 "Go on!" said simple Loo, half uncertain whether to 
 believe or not. 
 
 " Strite, " said Teddy. " You ask Mr. Wells. " 
 
 They had eggs warm from the hen; they picked their 
 own plums from the tree; and drank milk foaming from the 
 cow. 
 
 These two creatures of to-day came in touch for the 
 first time in their history with elemental life. They 
 watched slow men shambling about tasks that were old 
 before ever Babylon was built or Troy dreamed of — 
 making the earth fruitful, driving the cow to the bull, 
 fatting the calf, thatching the stack, breaking the colt, 
 sticking the pig, making cider, robbing the hive. They 
 peeped into dark smithies and beheld bare-armed men in 
 leather aprons hammering red-hot shoes in roaring fur- 
 naces and applying them hissing to the hoofs of hairy 
 horses; they beheld the flocks drift up the lanes from the 
 marshes to winter pasturage; they saw the reapers gather- 
 ing their sheaves in sun-browned arms as in the days of 
 Ruth. The huge, deliberate business of earth and beast 
 and tree, directed clumsily by man to his own ends and 
 advancement, went on before their unaccustomed eyes. 
 
70 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "It's so slow/' said Teddy in wide-eyed awe. "I 
 suppose it keeps moving. " 
 
 In those days they said little. They were content to 
 roam about arm in arm and watch and wonder. 
 
 Teddy walked with wide nostrils, filling his chest. 
 An unimaginable sense of the majesty and immensity of 
 all things breathed through him. He felt a bigger, calmer, 
 stronger man because of it. The slow large life around 
 had touched his soul. He was less swift, less flashy. 
 The bounder in him was in the background. 
 
 "You can see the sky here," he said solemnly. "Ain't 
 it a mighty great place? I didn't know there was so 
 much room." 
 
 Here there were neither policemen by day nor 
 prostitutes by night. Everything went much its own 
 way. There was a kind of slovenly liberty about it 
 all — no order, no discipline. All was large, tranquil: 
 silence, earth, and sky: wide clean spaces, dark- 
 ness and stars and strange little cries issuing from 
 the unknown. 
 
 At night they would walk under the star-shod vault of 
 heaven, watch the glow over the great coast-town behind 
 the hills, and listen to the ghostly bird that tu-hooed at 
 them out of the dusk. 
 
 Both of them felt the vastness of it all. 
 
 " It's 'uge ! " said Teddy in awed voice. " Makes ye feel 
 like lost." 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 71 
 
 The loving little woman pressed against him in the 
 darkness. 
 
 "There! we've got each other," she said. "That's 
 enough. We can leave the rest. " 
 
 Teddy's arm came creeping round her; and he pressed 
 his lips on hers with passion. 
 
 Then they would go in and climb quietly to their room 
 in the roof and lean out of their dormer window in the 
 darkness and see a train roar and rumble and flash like a 
 fiery dragon across the Weald. 
 
 It all made a kind of immense music in Teddy's soul. 
 
 He knew nothing like it but the river — and Doctor 
 English. 
 
 And the old life, the life that he had never known except 
 through his ancestors, came drifting back on Teddy out of 
 the Past in strange gleams as he roamed the fields they 
 had ploughed, walked field-paths hardened by their feet, 
 strolled through hazel woods and deep coverts and dewy 
 coppices which had seen his vicarious creation, passed 
 cottages in which they had died, breasted hills known of 
 old by their tired feet, and at sunset leaned over stiles 
 they had leaned over and looked on the same rise of ground 
 crowned with the same firs black against the same white 
 West, and wandered in the churchyard where they rested 
 after their labours. 
 
 Often he paused in wood or road and looked about 
 
73 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 him; a strange awe and exaltation in his face — looking, 
 listening. 
 
 "What is it, old man?" Loo would ask. 
 
 "Don't know I'm sure," Teddy would answer after a 
 pause. " Only seems like it all comes back to me. " 
 
 He could not explain his emotions to himself or to her. 
 They were shadows floating into the fringe of conscious- 
 ness out of some still deep ocean-mind behind the range of 
 intellect and the spoken word. 
 
 Mr. Wells, his host, was amazed to see how quickly he 
 picked up milking. 
 
 "You've been at this afore, I see," he said. 
 
 Teddy, his ginger head bowed against Betsy's white 
 flank, his fingers busy beneath her, answered nothing, 
 listening with closed eyes to the delicious hiss of the milk 
 in the pail between his knees. 
 
 Of evenings he often found himself sitting on a bench 
 under an old oak outside the village inn — a bench that 
 the landlord told him had been there four hundred years. 
 
 And one day glancing down he saw deep-cut in rude 
 letters between his legs the name 
 
 "Ted Boniface" 
 
 The perspiration started to his brow. He stood up 
 swiftly as one guilty of sacrilege and looked behind him. 
 "Come on, Loo," he said, harsh and husky. 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 73 
 
 As she took his arm, and they walked back into the 
 West, she felt him trembling. 
 
 "What is it, Ted?" she asked anxiously. 
 
 "Nothing," he answered; and it was not till next day 
 that he pointed out the name to Loo. 
 
 "Makes ye think," he said. 
 
 From their landlady they made covert inquiries of the 
 Bonifaces, though with the wariness that distinguishes 
 of necessity the classes who are circling about the brink 
 of the Abyss, Teddy would not allow Loo to reveal his 
 identity. 
 
 As he truly said, "You never know." 
 
 Directed by their landlady they paid a visit to the cot- 
 tage in which old Abraham Boniface had been born. 
 
 A bunchy red-faced woman answered their knock. 
 
 "Beg pardon, madam," said the little cockney. "Was 
 there a party by the name of Boniface lived here one 
 time?" 
 
 Yes; there was one time o' day, she believed. 
 
 Did she know anybody of that name hereabout now? 
 
 Oh, yes, surely. There'd be George Boniface in 
 Hazelhurst Street, and Mary Boniface oop o' Crab-tree, 
 and many more. 
 
 The young couple dropped down to Hazelhurst Street in 
 search of relations. 
 
 George Boniface was pointed out to them — a man 
 
74 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 much of Teddy's age with a heavy red moustache and high 
 cheek-bones working in a cottage garden opposite the 
 church. 
 
 The young people walked up and down in the road 
 nudging each other. 
 
 " Go and talk to him, " urged Loo. 
 
 "Not me," said Teddy, shrewd and serious. "He'd 
 want to take somethin' off o' me. " 
 
 "Silly!" said the sensible Loo. "Your own cousin and 
 all. Go on!" 
 
 Teddy shook his head stubbornly. 
 
 " I ain't a-goin' near him — not to tell him I'm his own 
 blood," he said. "You never know with these country 
 chaps. " 
 
 Loo got him to cross the road at last. 
 
 "Say, Mister," he began with a touch of defensive 
 swagger. "Might your name be Boniface, if you'll 
 excuse me. " 
 
 The other raised small dull eyes. The spirit of sus- 
 picion passed from man to man. The rustic stood up and 
 drew his hand across his nose. Then he looked behind 
 him and saw the wife of a neighbour standing in her 
 cottage door and listening. To deny his identity was 
 cleary impossible. 
 
 "Aye. I be George Bonifaace." 
 
 Teddy swaggered a little closer. 
 
 "There was one o' your name where I come from — 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 75 
 
 Job Boniface. Came from these parts, I believe. 'Yzel- 
 hurst." 
 
 The two first cousins stared at each other. George 
 didn't like the look of his inquisitor. He spoke funny, and 
 he asked questions. 
 
 He resumed his digging. 
 
 " Very like, " he said surlily. " He'd be my uncle Job — 
 farder's brother. I don't know nothin' of him at all. He 
 left these parts when I was a nipper. " 
 
 "He worked up where I lived," continued Teddy. 
 "Brewery. Tomkinson's. Back o' the Red Lion Yard. 
 Wantage Street. " 
 
 "Indeed," said the other. "He'd be my uncle. I've 
 yeard ta-alk of him. " And then fearing he had said too 
 much — "Leastways I've yeard farder ta-alk of him. I 
 don't know nothing at all about him mesalf . " 
 
 "Ah, "said Teddy. "Good-day. My name's 'Ankey. " 
 
 He rejoined Loo with a glitter of triumph in his eyes. 
 
 "Leary chap, I'll lay," he confided to his bride. "But 
 he didn't take nothin' off o' me. " 
 
 As he walked away, his cousin looked up from his dig- 
 ging, and followed the other's back down the road with 
 amused eyes. 
 
 That chap with the ginger head hadn't bested him! 
 
 The mystery and romance soon wore off. 
 
 Teddy became critical. He went to the station and 
 
76 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 watched the trains go Londonward. The platform, the 
 advertisements, the mild bustle, gave him comfort. 
 
 "Seems more like 'ome," he said as he juggled with a 
 penny-in-the-slot machine. 
 
 On Sunday the young couple went to church and sat 
 at the back — Teddy in a spirit of keen and flippant 
 criticism looking up toward the altar and dim windows his 
 forefathers had eyed with dull awe from that same seat. 
 
 The front pew on the left of the aisle had a door. 
 Teddy pointed it out to Loo. 
 
 "That's it," he whispered. "Quality at the top; the 
 rest below; and Jesus Christ nowhere." 
 
 The tall young squire and his rustling wife came in a 
 little late and took their places in the pew with the door. 
 
 "That's style, that is," whispered Teddy. "Come in 
 just a little lite, and then everybody '11 see your noo frock 
 strite from Paree. " 
 
 With grim eyes he watched the squire and his wife go up 
 to the altar, followed by the congregation in order of social 
 importance. 
 
 And when the service was over he stood in the porch 
 and saw the pair walk away through a crowd of hat-touch- 
 ing rustics. 
 
 "They think he's the Almighty; and he can't chuck 'em 
 so much as a good-morning, " he said. " Servile, I call it. " 
 
 He was the new man amid old things — too far from 
 
HIS HONEYMOON 77 
 
 them to understand their old-world beauty, their fragrance 
 of the forgotten, too near to them to be interested rather 
 than scornful. 
 
 That evening was the last of their stay. 
 
 In the dusk the young pair strolled through hazel-woods 
 together. 
 
 "Would you like to live here all your life, Ted?" asked 
 Loo. 
 
 "No," answered Ted sturdily. "I want more." He 
 opened his arms wide. "Life for me." 
 
vra 
 
 HIS HOME 
 
 Teddy Hankey returned to the town as a naked 
 man returns to his clothes. 
 
 As he walked through the streets and felt the warmth of 
 the humming millions about him once again, he began to 
 whistle. 
 
 "More like, Loo," he said. "Some chance o' getting 
 run over here. " 
 
 The couple settled down at 23 Archery Row. 
 
 Archery Row is a broad and almost trafficless street with 
 low drab houses on either side of it. At one end is the 
 Brighton Arms and the tram-line that serves as the nerve 
 connecting the outlying limb and the heart and brain of 
 the great town; at the other end are the wharves 
 and tall warehouses of Mudsey Wall where all day long 
 the thick-massed barges, that make a floor far out into the 
 river, open their wide maws to the hook of the hoisting 
 crane and deliver up the sea-borne wealth of earth and 
 mine to fill the belly and warm the blood of the million- 
 mouthed city. 
 
 But if Archery Row was dull, it was not squalid. The 
 
 78 
 
HIS HOME 79 
 
 inhabitants of it were well above the poverty-line, the 
 bulk of them earning a fair subsistence without a margin 
 for ill-health or accident. Mr. Starkie, the Relieving 
 Officer, was seldom seen there; while the postman was a 
 regular visitor. Here and there a family took in a lodger; 
 but in the main there was one family to each house. 
 Doctor English with his shilling-practice had many pa- 
 tients in the Row. 
 
 Archery Row was highly respectable; and it was 
 respectable because the men who lived there were in 
 regular employment: policemen, Borough servants, guards 
 and engine drivers from the London and Brighton Rail- 
 way, workers at Mapleton's, tin-plate men and skilled 
 artisans generally. Through an archway half down the 
 Row an alley ran to the Paradise Courts and Pleasant 
 Places, a festering mass of hovels swept away out of sight, 
 where herded the casual workers, the chronics, the in- 
 competents, the men who couldn't work, the men who 
 wouldn't work, the unmarried women who were always 
 in trouble, the flower sellers, the flower makers, the jam 
 and biscuit hands from the great factories by the river, 
 the physically afflicted, the morally infirm, the mentally 
 defective; where families lived in single rooms; and the 
 Relieving Officer, the Detective, the Sanitary Inspector, 
 the Agent for the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to 
 Children, the Captain of the Church Army, the Salvation 
 Army Lass, the Broker's Man, Miss English, and all those 
 
80 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 who dabbled for love or money in the lees of Mudsey So- 
 ciety jostled each other to prop the weak or prey on 
 them. 
 
 The dwellers in Archery Row, on the other hand, were 
 solid men if small; the houses themselves were solid if 
 small; and the rents likewise solid if small. 
 
 The Row was owned by a company. And a company 
 has no heart to which to appeal, and shareholders who 
 mean to have dividends. So if you lived in the Row you 
 paid your rent down week by week on Monday morning — 
 or you went. There was never any mistake about that. 
 The Mudsey Improved Artisans' Dwellings Company had 
 a reputation to live up to, and a 6 per cent, dividend upon 
 its ordinary shares to earn. And it lived up to its repu- 
 tation, and earned its dividend. 
 
 Teddy was lucky to get a house in the Row, and he 
 knew it. For it was one of those rare London streets, 
 hidden away here and there, where the houses are low, and 
 the highway broad, and the sky draws down to earth like 
 the broad gray bosom of a sitting hen. Men came there 
 mysteriously of evenings to absorb that sky. It was all 
 they knew of Nature; and it was enough. 
 
 Apart from the sky the only remainder of the large life 
 of the wilderness beating behind the drab was a lark that 
 hung in a cage outside one of the houses. On a window- 
 ledge to either side of it was a window box. In each box 
 was a spadeful of brown earth. And out of the earth 
 
HIS HOME 81 
 
 issued wall flowers. In front of each toy garden was a toy 
 paling and a toy gate. This house was tenanted by a 
 man from Yarmouth, who had once known and breathed 
 the sea. 
 
 Those were the only gardens in the Row, the only flash 
 of earth, stripped bare and brown, the only green, the 
 only flowers. 
 
 And between them on the wall hung the lark in prison, 
 hopping to and fro, able to see the green, but forbidden for 
 ever to attain to it. 
 
 And when after the long and desolate winter there came, 
 blown across the waste oceans of roofs and up the river, a 
 rumour of the spring, the unforgetting bird brimmed 
 over in rivulets of love and joy. And as it lifted on the 
 wings of its song, it dropped always defeated by its envi- 
 ronment — only to aspire once more, once more to taste 
 defeat. 
 
 Teddy, on his way back from work one April evening, 
 struck to the heart by the bird's amazing song, paused 
 to watch its unending heavenward efforts and as unending 
 failures. 
 
 He stopped whistling and went home with drooping 
 head. 
 
 "I don't like to see that bird in its cage. Really, I 
 don't, " he told his wife. " ' Tain't right. Sings as if it 
 had a soul. " 
 
 "It's a shame," said the sympathetic Loo. "That's 
 
82 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 what it is. It's that Mrs. Kirby. Says it's happier there 
 than if it was free. " 
 
 Teddy shook his head. 
 
 "I wouldn't like to be in a cage meself. That's how I 
 figure it out, " he said. " Shootin' up into the sky to bang 
 your nut ag'in' the top of your cage every time till you're 
 bald. There's no 'ope in it. " 
 
 She lifted a smiling face to his. 
 
 "There, you'll never be in a cage, old man," she cried, 
 tenderly chaffing. "Don't take it to heart so. " 
 
 He washed the tan off face and arms and hands at the 
 sink. 
 
 "If he wants to fly, why can't they let him?" he mut- 
 tered. 
 
 "She says if she let him out he'd only come to grief," 
 Loo answered. 
 
 "He'd learn," said Teddy stoutly. "Let him fly. 
 Let him fall. Who's for a cage? Liberty's life — 
 even if you do come to grief. What's the good of 
 it else?" 
 
 He dried his hands. Loo watched his thin arms and 
 sloping shoulders with loving eyes. 
 
 There were few husbands in Archery Row or in England 
 for the matter of that like hers — Loo was confident of 
 that. 
 
 "That soft — like a child," she said to Miss English, 
 when that lady called. 
 
HIS HOME 83 
 
 "He was always an affectionate fellow,' ' replied the 
 other, taking in the room with shrewd, approving eyes. 
 "Don't spoil him now in the early days. Marriages are 
 made in heaven and marred in the first six months on 
 earth. There's nothing like a little discipline before 
 they're too old. " 
 
 Loo smiled. 
 
 "He gets it sometimes, Miss," she said. 
 
 The other nodded brightly. 
 
 "That's right," she said, and marched away, plump, 
 practical, and businesslike, to disappear through the 
 archway. 
 
 Loo indeed always played second fiddle to her husband 
 — except when it was expedient and necessary for their 
 joint peace and happiness that she should assert herself. 
 Then she pierced the bluff and bluster of a child in which 
 Teddy liked to shroud his weakness, and took command. 
 On these occasions Teddy would surrender without a 
 struggle. The bubble burst; the man collapsed — from 
 sheer surprise. He ceased to be the bold big conqueror he 
 loved to act, very strong and tempersome, and became the 
 tearful little boy. 
 
 And when she had won him thus to humble mood, she 
 relapsed quietly into the second place. 
 
 Once in a too easy moment he spat on the kitchen floor. 
 
 She handed him a wet rag. 
 
84 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Wipe it up!" she said with the quiet authority that 
 distinguished her upon occasion. 
 
 He obeyed, concealing his abasement behind shame- 
 faced giggles. 
 
 And Loo might very reasonably object to her husband 
 spitting upon the floor : for she kept her house as bright as 
 the brass knocker on the door. 
 
 In Teddy's eyes his home had but one defect: you 
 stepped down from the street into the entry; and Teddy 
 didn't like that descent. He thought it lowering morally 
 and socially as well as physically. 
 
 "Step h'up," he said, "not down. That's 'ow it 
 should be accordin' to my liking. " 
 
 "Best start 'umble, Ted, " said the careful Loo. "And 
 work up. " 
 
 "Start 'ow ye like," said cheerful Teddy. "Take ye 
 Buckinum Palis on a ninety-nine years' lease — if you'll 
 only say the word. " 
 
 The wine of life ran rich in his veins in those days. He 
 was young, he was married, he had a home of his own, 
 steady work, and quite as much wages as was good for 
 him; and best of all he was in love. 
 
 Teddy was so much in love indeed that he even told his 
 wife what his money was, and though there were many 
 good husbands in Archery Row there were few besides 
 himself who went to that romantic length. 
 
 And he never kept back more than a few shillings — 
 
HIS HOME 85 
 
 except with winks when he was going to make her a 
 present. 
 
 And if Teddy was earning good money, he needed it, 
 for he was not by nature thrifty, and liked to flash his 
 money round, though he was never riotous. 
 
 The young pair spent most of their joint savings in 
 furnishing the house; but they did it on large capitalist 
 lines. Teddy's principle was to have everything a little 
 better than the neighbours, and then to invite the neigh- 
 bours in to see. 
 
 There was a carpet on the stairs — carpet at 6d. 
 a yard, to say nothing of stair rods. In their bed- 
 room was a brass bedstead with a wire mattress, and 
 curtains to the window; and in the parlour a mahogany 
 bureau that nobody used, a harmonium that neither 
 could play, and knickknacks innumerable, expensive 
 and vain. 
 
 When Doctor and Miss English came to visit them, 
 Teddy threw open the mahogany bureau and placed a 
 half-written letter on it. Otherwise it was never used. 
 For the same occasion he bought some music and placed 
 it on the stand of the harmonium. 
 
 "Hullo ! " cried the cheery doctor. " I didn't know you 
 were a musician, Teddy. " 
 
 Teddy swayed his head and shoulders bashfully. 
 
 "Oh, I just rattle about a bit, sir," he said. "You 
 know. " 
 
86 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Let's hear you," said Miss English, sitting down 
 firmly. 
 
 Teddy looked more foolish. 
 
 "I've 'urt me finger, Miss," he answered. 
 
 "Let's see it," said the lady, firmer than ever. 
 
 "My wife's lookin' after it," replied Teddy with some 
 dignity, "thank you." 
 
 The lady looked at Loo, who had looked out of the 
 window. 
 
 "That's right, " said Miss English. "And I hope she's 
 looking after you too. She's got twice the gumption you 
 have. Now I should sell this silly harmonium" — she 
 tapped it — "and join a Friendly Society. That's insur- 
 ance against a rainy day." 
 
 " She's got Friendly Societies on the brine, my belief , " 
 said Teddy surlily, after she was gone. 
 
 Nevertheless he obeyed Miss English — to show he bore 
 her no grudge; and disobeyed her — to preserve his self- 
 respect and maintain his independence. 
 
 He did not join a Friendly Society, but he sold the 
 harmonium and bought a gramophone, which, as he said 
 with considerable acerbity, played itself, so that she 
 couldn't make a row about that. 
 
 Loo was against the gramophone as she had been 
 against the harmonium; but she gave in to Ted, as 
 she did about most things except such as were bad 
 for him. 
 
HIS HOME 87 
 
 The gramophone cost £3, and more for records. On 
 Sundays it blared and squeaked and chattered like a 
 death's head become articulate. It jarred Teddy to the 
 roots of his neurotic soul; but he liked the neighbours to 
 know he had something they hadn't. Then when a man 
 up the street got one, Teddy sold his at a loss but with 
 considerable relief to himself and Loo and his neighbours. 
 
 "One in the street's plenty," he said. "Only I paid 
 for mine, and 'e stole 'is. " 
 
 Teddy was like that. He loved to be distinguished, 
 not quite like everybody else; just a little gentlemanly he 
 called it. There was no side and no snobbery about Loo; 
 but there was a good deal of both about her husband. 
 Indeed it was the airs he gave himself that first won Loo's 
 heart on the day when he came with his smile and his 
 swagger down the street and chirped at her as he passed. 
 
 When the gramophone had been sold for 15s. Ted 
 bought a bicycle and trailer for considerably more than 
 that sum. 
 
 " 'Ow you do chuck the pieces about, to be sure!" cried 
 Loo, half admiring and half shocked. "Like a lord." 
 
 "Well, I got 'em, ain't I?" said Teddy. "What's the 
 good of havin' 'em if you don't spend 'em? Must circu- 
 late a bit surely. Step into your carriage. I'll take you 
 for a ride in the Park like a lydy. " 
 
 In the trailer Teddy took Loo out on Saturdays and 
 Sundays. His aim was to reach the country; but he 
 
88 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 never got farther than Richmond Park. The strain made 
 him sweat; and his cough got worse. 
 
 Also the seagulls were coming up the river now, and the 
 days shortening. So Loo made him give it up till the 
 summer returned; and the bike and trailer were lodged 
 in the tiny parlour along with the brass-mounted bureau, 
 the birds of paradise, and the knickknacks, expensive, 
 numerous, and vain. 
 
 It took up the whole of the parlour, but that didn'i: 
 matter; for they had no visitors, and lived the simple life 
 in the kitchen at the back, Teddy in his shirtsleeves smok- 
 ing cigarettes or reading, and Loo working. 
 
 The young pair, like most of their class, kept themselves 
 strictly to themselves. In his heart Teddy indeed thought 
 himself just a cut above his neighbours. And this was not 
 peculiar to Teddy : it was common to the inhabitants of the 
 Row. The huggermugger manners of those who dwelt 
 on the edge of the Abyss through the archway, where life 
 necessarily impinged on life, property on property, was 
 not for them. Aloofness was their distinguishing charac- 
 teristic, the symbol that they had just attained to that 
 level in society where they could stand alone. And 
 because they had only just attained to it, they were more 
 jealous of their footing, prouder of their independence, 
 more tenacious of the right to individualize, than in a 
 higher class where the privilege had been longer won and 
 was more securely established. In Archery Row there 
 
HIS HOME 89 
 
 was little give or take. Each family stood on its own feet. 
 The line between them was clear-cut and definite. They 
 had earned the right to be proud, and had not acquired the 
 virtue of humility. They leaned on no one — Church or 
 State. 
 
 And the young couple were entirely willing to ignore and 
 to be ignored. Isolation only bound them more closely 
 together. Outside there were five million souls seething 
 about their home, and mainly unaware of them within over 
 the fire. 
 
 Sometimes imaginative Teddy thought of those millions 
 broad-spread for miles about him. 
 
 Then he would creep to the window and peep out, 
 tapping on the pane. 
 
 "They're all there," he would whisper with a chuckle. 
 "Who's afraid?" 
 
IX 
 
 HIS CHILD 
 
 Every morning Teddy Hankey got up at 5 : 20. He 
 said no prayers; he preferred to light Loo's fire and put her 
 kettle on for her. 
 
 At 5.25 the street door opened and he ran to the works, 
 a muffler about his throat. On Friday and Saturday 
 mornings he whistled as he ran and greeted acquaintances 
 cheerily by the light of street lamps. Then he had Sun- 
 day and the day with Loo shining ahead of him. On 
 Monday it was different. He was usually a little late, 
 and aware that the time-keeper at the gate of the works, 
 who was his enemy, would refuse him admittance if he was 
 a second behind, and he would lose an hour's work, and 
 the foreman would mark him down. Therefore he ran 
 silently, doggedly, seeing no one, greeting no one; and 
 there was a cloud over his heart, which dispersed toward 
 the middle of the week. 
 
 Teddy lived for thirteen hours a day for six days a week 
 in the stench of green hides straight from the slaughter 
 house, and the slop and filth of dung pits and the offal 
 from the fleshers' knives; the hum of the great water 
 
 90 
 
HIS CHILD 91 
 
 drums in his ears; and his eyes and nostrils obsessed by- 
 huge and unsavoury white hides drawn by labouring 
 beam-men out of the lime-pits to be piled by the beams, 
 stripped by the unhairers, and scraped by the fleshers. 
 
 The process was in part filthy; the hours long; the 
 atmosphere always laden and often foul. 
 
 But in those days Teddy did not complain, did not ask 
 questions. His wages were good, and his own work at a 
 splitting-machine of an inoffensive if wearing character. 
 Moreover, an unconscious conservative, he thought it was 
 the way of the world and accepted it as he accepted life. 
 A keen if somewhat shallow mind, not as yet dulled by 
 labour, he was still economically asleep. That great 
 awakening which comes sometimes slowly, sometimes with 
 incredible swiftness, to the workers of our day as experi- 
 ence teaches them how the monster edifice of Society 
 which rests upon their shoulders bows them down to earth, 
 had not come to him as yet. The great Why which is 
 being asked ever more loudly by the workers throughout 
 the world had not begun to buzz incessantly in Teddy 
 Hankey's ears. He had never cared for economics or 
 absorbed the simple teaching of Doctor English; and when 
 a Socialist in the works, a man who worked on the same 
 machine as himself in the splitting-shop, began to sound 
 him, Teddy told him cheerfully to shut his head. 
 
 "Ah, you'll come to it, my boy!" replied the other. 
 "You'll come to it. You're all right now — only yourself 
 
92 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 and your wife. Wait till you've 'alf-a-dozen kids — and 
 six months out of work to keep 'em on.". 
 
 " Come to me second childhood. Maybe I will, " jeered 
 Teddy. "I'm to do me twelve hours a day, and then 
 share me wages with the loafer at the corner. Not me!" 
 
 The other swaggered away. 
 
 "Ah, you go up to the West-end, and see how they live 
 there, and then remember who they're living on. And 
 that's you, my boy — and then come back and think it 
 over a bit. " 
 
 Swiney was the man's name. He was a member of the 
 Social Democratic party and incredibly bitter without 
 much apparent reason for it. A plump young man with a 
 paunch, a low forehead, pouchy cheeks, and a handsome 
 tawny moustache, on Sundays he wore a red tie and smelt 
 strongly of cheap scent. There was something rankly 
 coarse about him; and he had a trick of tumbling sudden- 
 ly to sleep, his face down, on any couch or bed he might 
 be sitting on. Yet this man, sensual by nature to the 
 roots of him, was a passionate scholar, and mastered him- 
 self effectively for the sake of an ideal. 
 
 In the pursuit of knowledge he endured hardships 
 worthy of an ascetic seeking the Kingdom of God. Often 
 he would sit up to the small hours after a hard day's work 
 in the shop reading by the light of a candle. For the sake 
 of books he largely denied himself beer and tobacco, at 
 immense cost to his carnal frame. In the whole of London 
 
HIS CHILD 93 
 
 there were few men with a better economic library than 
 the leather worker of Mudsey. Marshall's "Principles 
 of Economics," Webbs' "Industrial Democracy," Gib- 
 bin's "Economic Inquiries," Marx and Mill, Lotze and 
 Cunningham, books old and new, price sixpence or a 
 guinea, from the German or from the French, were to be 
 found on the broad deal board that formed the bookshelf 
 above his bed. 
 
 And to have seen him sitting on a barrel in the yard at 
 the dinner hour expounding Ricardo's Theory of Rent to a 
 rapt company of his mates would have shocked the club- 
 men at the West-end of the town who dearly cherished the 
 illusion that the workers were illiterate. 
 
 Swiney's passion was rather that of the social reformer 
 than the scholar. He burned to know that he might do. 
 And what he believed he burned to do was to give the 
 workers, and most of all himself, room to breathe, leisure 
 to live, the chance to enjoy. But in truth hatred of the 
 upper class rather than love of his own was the master 
 passion of his life, although he did not know it. His 
 method was destruction: Doctor English his bete noir. 
 "Socialist!" he would cry with bitter scorn. "Senti- 
 mentalist — that's what English is. " He was then a 
 fanatic of a somewhat ignoble kind, and almost innocuous; 
 because his fanaticism had its roots in that which cannot 
 abide. He was in word, and not in deed. The men did 
 not like him, though they listened to him. He could never 
 
94 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 have led them for long: for he lacked in moral power. 
 And the energy that in a better man would have found its 
 outlet in action curdled within him and uttered itself only 
 in poisoned words. 
 
 Yet he was inspired through and through with the zeal 
 of a missionary, though his gospel was hardly that of 
 Love. In his pockets he invariably carried newspaper 
 cuttings in which members of the House of Lords or the 
 ruling classes had disparaged the workers and spoken of 
 them as canaille, riff-raff, tag-rag-and-bob-tail, and the 
 like. These he would read his mates whenever oppor- 
 tunity offered. 
 
 It was his function to keep the flame of Hate flickering 
 in the hearts of the workers. To that end he consecrated 
 his life; and his comparative failure was to him a source of 
 inconceivable secret bitterness. 
 
 A thoroughgoing determinist, he had for the Church 
 the loathing that Teddy merely feigned. He averred that 
 it was an institution kept up by the Plutocracy in the 
 interests of Capitalism; and always referred to a chapel as 
 a laudanum shop. He would express some respect for 
 the Conservative party, and the fiercest contempt for the 
 Liberals. All or nothing was his motto. Anything was 
 better than a half and half. 
 
 He was not married, and held and preached that no 
 self-respecting workingman should marry under present 
 conditions. 
 
HIS CHILD 95 
 
 "Ive trouble enough to keep myself," he said. Let 
 alone a wife and kids." 
 
 Teddy paid little heed to him. He was happy on the 
 whole; and the vista of forty years of drudgery with no 
 daylight at the end of it had not yet opened to his eyes. 
 
 Yet something Swiney said struck root in his mind; and 
 when by chance he found himself at the West-end of the 
 town he looked about him with new and wondering eyes. 
 
 It was all very different there certainly: the calm, the 
 leisure, the spaciousness; the quiet solemn houses; the 
 wide streets with the peep of green park at the end; the 
 big befurred ladies, marching splendid and stately; the 
 tall men with their crisp hair, clean collars, grave good 
 eyes, and air of massive security; the women in bonnets 
 wheeling other women's babies, the sweep of sky; the 
 huge hotels with men in livery standing on the steps. 
 
 Teddy stared. And as he did so down one broad still 
 highway with an island of green floating at the end of it, a 
 battered cab rolled slowly. The cab was piled with lug- 
 gage; and behind it padded a lean, brown wolf -man, his 
 boots in shreds and clothes in tatters. 
 
 It was raining slightly. 
 
 The cab drew up at a hotel. Down the steps came a 
 well-fed porter, with the curly black hair and sleek 
 comeliness of the foreigner, and took the luggage on his 
 back. The wolf-man stood in the road and watched him 
 disappear up the steps. The cab trundled away. The 
 
96 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 wolf-man was left standing in the drizzle with hanging 
 head, thinking. Then he padded swiftly across the road 
 in his shredded boots. 
 
 "This is the most God-forsaken country I ever see," 
 he barked hoarsely as he passed. 
 
 "Been out long?" asked Teddy. 
 
 "Had one broken week this last six months," the wolf- 
 man answered. "Tramped four hundred miles with the 
 heartache. Then a man give me a bob ticket for work in 
 a Church Army yard. They put me navvying with 
 nothing in me belly only pieces — no good meat. Can't 
 do the work! Course you can't do it. I quit. Sooner 
 break a shop window than break me 'eart. " 
 
 The two walked a little way together. 
 
 "You ain't got the price of a bed in a doss-house on 
 you? " asked the wolf -man. 
 
 Teddy shook his head. 
 
 "Stand you two of gin, " he said, and led the way into a 
 public house. 
 
 He was very quiet that evening as he sat in his shirt- 
 sleeves before the fire and smoked his fag. 
 Loo noticed it. 
 
 "Got the 'ump, old man?" she asked. 
 "No, " he answered. " I was just a-thinking. " 
 "What was you thinking of?" 
 Teddy looked into the fire. 
 
HIS CHILD 97 
 
 "You and me and the byby," he said; and rising knelt 
 at her feet. 
 
 "'Ow are ye, little mother?" he asked tenderly. 
 
 She answered him with shy eyes. 
 
 "Nicely thank you, dad." 
 
 He clasped his hands behind her head, and drew down 
 her face to his. 
 
 "One above, if there is one, bless father and mother and 
 kid, all three, " he prayed. 
 
 Then he went back to his paper. In Berlin the unem- 
 ployed had been rioting and the police sabring them. 
 Teddy read out extracts with comments. 
 
 "Makes ye think a bit," he said. "This afternoon I 
 met a chap who'd been out six months only for one broken 
 week." 
 
 "Funny thing they can't do nothing, " said Loo. 
 
 "Boo! they can do plenty. It's not can't: it's wonH" 
 cried Teddy, suddenly repeating Swiney word for word. 
 "They won't do nothing lest they hurt their blooming 
 selves. " 
 
 There followed a spell of overtime, when he was doing 
 fourteen hours a day. 
 
 The strain soon told on Teddy, never very strong; and 
 Swiney grew on him astonishingly. 
 
 He slept restlessly, ate little, and was too tired to talk 
 when he came home. 
 
 One night Loo woke to find him no longer at her side. 
 
98 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Then she saw him standing at the window, peering out into 
 the darkness. Returning home dead-beat, he had gone to 
 bed in his shirt and trousers, and now stood holding back 
 the blind and staring out into the rainy night. 
 
 She rose and came to his side. 
 
 His eyes were open; but she knew he was asleep. 
 
 "Millions on 'em," he whispered; and felt the window- 
 pane with his fingers. 
 
 "Ted," she said. 
 
 He did not answer. 
 
 Tenderly she wrapped her arm about him. 
 
 He woke with a start and began to struggle and shout. 
 
 "Steady, old man!" she said; and the quiet strength of 
 her entered into his wire-drawn frame. 
 
 He soothed to her voice and began to sweat and shake. 
 
 "That you, Loo?" he whispered. "I thought they'd 
 got me again. I did — so 'elp me. I thought I was in 
 there." 
 
 "In where, Ted?" 
 
 He panted and looked at her with scared eyes. 
 
 She led him back to bed and tucked him up. Then 
 she put her hand upon his forehead. 
 
 "Why, your hair's sopping!" she cried. 
 
 He smiled at her, frightened still. 
 
 "I got a touch of the 'orrors," he shivered. 
 
 She went downstairs and brewed him a cup of tea. 
 
 "It's this overtime," she said. "Sweating, I call it. 
 
HIS CHILD 99 
 
 Mapleton ought to be ashamed of himself. A gentleman 
 like that." 
 
 "He don't care about us, " said Teddy, Swiney speaking 
 through his lips once more; and added with more justice, 
 "and if he didn't do it, others would and he'd be squeezed 
 out of the market. I don't so much blame him. It's the 
 system. " 
 
 She put out the candle and crept into bed beside him. 
 He sought her hand. She snuggled comfortably down. 
 
 " You go to sleep now, old man, " she said. 
 
 He shut his eyes. 
 
 A step sounded in the street outside. He sat bolt 
 upright in bed. 
 
 "Who's that?" he cried with thumping heart. 
 
 "Only the copper," said Loo, sleepy and sensible. 
 
 Teddy's eyes and mouth were wide. 
 
 "My God!" he gasped. 
 
 Erect in bed, he listened to the massive footsteps be- 
 neath and only retreated again beneath the sheets when 
 the last sound of them had died away. 
 
 The bad time passed. There were no more boom-prices 
 and no more overtime. The anxious look left Teddy's 
 eyes and he resumed himself. 
 
 On Sundays he walked abroad with Loo on his arm; and 
 no duke was ever more careful of his duchess carrying his 
 heir than Teddy of his Loo. 
 
100 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 They would go down Mudsey Wall on Sundays and 
 establish themselves on the tiny strip of beach beside the 
 river where they had done their courting. The place had 
 grown dear to them for associations' sake, and they spoke 
 of it fondly as their shore. Nobody disturbed them there; 
 for only seagulls haunted it, and a few tadpole boys 
 flashing in and out of the water in the heat of summer. 
 
 Teddy bought a deck chair in which Loo could lie like a 
 lady and watch the seaward-rushing river, wave at the 
 waving steamers, and wonder at the yawning miracle of 
 the Tower Bridge. 
 
 Lying there in the hush and mystery of the stream that 
 wound its shining way through their hearts and memories, 
 they spoke little, drawn always nearer to nature and each 
 other by the intimate music of its glancing life. 
 
 "It don't worry," mused Teddy, chucking pebbles idly 
 into the silver-streaked waters. "It's been running on 
 just so all the time. Don't seem to get tired nor nothing. 
 Think of a million years ago, and then of a million years 
 on. It'll be here just the same. And where'll you and I 
 be then, oi' gal?" 
 
 "We'll be all right, I'll lay," said Loo comfortably as 
 she worked. 
 
 She had no self-conscious faith; but in its stead that 
 sense at the heart peculiar to the good woman of every 
 class and every creed that life is in its essence sound. 
 
 Teddy nodded. 
 
HIS CHItD 101 
 
 " That's what Doctor English says, " he mused. " God's 
 all right, he says, or something — I forget the words; it's 
 out of a poet. God's all right and don't you worry, he 
 says. " 
 
 When Loo's time came, she lay with bright flushed face 
 and shining eyes. There was a pucker in her forehead, 
 but her eyes smiled at the man who stood at the foot of the 
 bed, all his courage gone, and whimpered : 
 
 "Oh, Loo!" 
 
 " Cheer, Ted, " she said. " I ain't a-goin' out, no fear. " 
 
 The room was tiny, and Doctor English in his shirt- 
 sleeves held the door. 
 
 "I ain't a-goin'," said Teddy, stubborn and tearful. 
 
 "You or I, which?" said the big doctor. 
 
 Teddy went downstairs and shivered in the trailer in the 
 parlour. 
 
 A few minutes later the doctor followed him. Teddy 
 was amazed at the other's calm cheerfulness. 
 
 "Is it all over?" he asked. 
 
 The doctor laughed. 
 
 "No, it hasn't begun," he said and went out. 
 
 Teddy leapt after him, fierce and white. 
 
 "Say, where are you going?" 
 
 "I'm going to get some chloroform." 
 
 "What!" cried Teddy. "Going to ampitate her?" 
 
 The doctor turned. 
 
102 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Come!" he said. "You'd best go off to your work. 
 You're doing no good here. " 
 
 Teddy obeyed. 
 
 His mates nudged each other and winked. 
 
 "It's his missus. Her first," said one. 
 
 "Wonderful how these young chaps take on," said 
 another. 
 
 "Ah, time was, you was the same way yourself." 
 
 Swiney came up and was sympathetic. A red-hot 
 gospeller, that young man never missed a chance. 
 
 "It's happened before and I dare say it'll happen 
 again, " he said in the droll philosophical way he adopted 
 in his rare lighter moods. "Keep your 'eart up, Ted. 
 You'll go home to find a youngster crowing daddy." 
 
 Teddy smiled wofully through his tears. 
 
 Doctor English was putting on his coat in the parlour, 
 and looking out of the window. 
 
 The sense that Something was coming and that It was 
 big and beautiful was strong on him. 
 
 It was always so with him at these new births. 
 
 A breathless cockney voice burst in on his reverie. 
 
 "Well, sir! What is it?" 
 
 "All well," said the doctor, deep and dreaming. "A 
 little girl. Fine child." 
 
 A hand clutched his arm. 
 
 "And how's she?" 
 
HIS CHILD 103 
 
 "Capital. Sleeping now. Don't disturb her. I'll 
 look round again later." 
 
 Teddy crept upstairs. 
 
 In the bedroom there was a strange crying that sent a 
 thrill through him; and a woman was rocking something 
 in the dusk. 
 
 She held up her finger. 
 
 Teddy entered softly. Loo was sleeping. He bent 
 over her and kissed her forehead. 
 
 The nurse pulled aside a cloth and drew back the blind. 
 
 Teddy looked at his child with frightened eyes, biting 
 his nails. 
 
 "Christ!" he gasped. 
 
 Then he sat down, sweating. 
 
 Another soul had been added to London's millions. 
 
HIS FATHERHOOD 
 
 Fatherhood changed Teddy considerably. 
 
 "You ain't so larky as you was, Ted/' chaffed Loo. 
 
 Teddy wagged his head sturdily and looked responsible. 
 
 "I'm a family man now," he said. "Got to take it 
 steady." 
 
 On Sundays he was no longer to be found in the crowd 
 about a stump, heckling a parson. Instead he walked 
 soberly down Mudsey Wall toward their shore, a white 
 burthen in his arms. 
 
 There was an added pressure upon him, the pressure 
 of the new generation. He was being driven forward at a 
 great pace. His eyes were brighter, his cheeks hollower, 
 and the old look of strain was oftener on his face. And 
 every now and then he coughed. 
 
 Aunt Eleanor, had she been alive, would have told him 
 that he was growing more like his mother; and once or 
 twice Doctor English rolling by him on his bicycle said 
 with the sternness of the old schoolmaster, 
 
 "Steady, Ted!" 
 
 Always a sober man, Teddy had still been a bit of a 
 
 104 
 
HIS FATHERHOOD 105 
 
 rebel in a light and frolicsome way. Now he became law- 
 abiding. He took more pains to be on good terms with 
 the foreman; and on the rare occasions when he met the 
 manager, or Mr. Mapleton, or Mr. Edward, the young 
 guv 'nor, he would touch his hat to them. He even went 
 so far as to attempt to make it up with the fat time-keeper, 
 and was repulsed severely, ending by calling his ancient 
 enemy Big Belly before a crowd. 
 
 But this was a chance flare-up of the old Teddy. 
 
 " Best keep in with them at the top," he said. " There's 
 Meg." 
 
 He was therefore a great disappointment to Swiney, who 
 had cherished hopes of him at one time. 
 
 "Ted's a 'igh old Tory," he said not without bitter- 
 ness. " God save the King and let the workers go to rot. 
 That's what Ted is." 
 
 "There must be rich, and there must be poor, so long 
 as the world goes round," replied Teddy somewhat tartly. 
 "That's what I says. They can't 'elp 'emselves, a lot of 
 'em." 
 
 "There must be rich and there must be poor, so 
 long as the workers are a pack of fat-'eaded fools — 
 and not a minute longer," retorted the stout young 
 man bitterly. 
 
 Teddy indeed was now very conservative. He had 
 his child christened in church because it was the proper 
 
106 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 thing to do, and he wanted her to have every chance. 
 For her sake he even made up to the curate, who met 
 him with such simple friendliness that Teddy, genuinely 
 moved, went to church on the succeeding Sunday for the 
 first time since he had been in Mudsey. 
 
 Miss English met him at the door and was amazed. 
 
 " You here, Teddy ! " she beamed. " This is a surprise." 
 
 Teddy looked silly, almost surly. 
 
 "Yes, Miss," he said shortly. "Mr. Jerrold." 
 
 This was a confession and a justification. By it he 
 meant to warn the orthodox lady that his motive was not 
 religious — it bore no relation to God; neither was it 
 personal — it had nothing to do with the saving of his 
 soul. His visit to the house of God was a tribute of re- 
 spect and gratitude to Mr. Jerrold, M. A., late of Trinity, 
 Oxford, and now a curate at St. Saviour's, Mudsey. It 
 was a sort of return-call, a thank-you to a nice man which 
 could not be said otherwise. Because Mr. Jerrold was a 
 gentleman and a sportsman Teddy, himself a gentleman 
 and a sportsman, stood for one hour on Sunday evening in 
 as conspicuous a place as he could find singing : 
 
 "Hark! hark! my soul!" 
 
 and praying that the curate's eye would fall upon him and 
 recognize that his courtesy had been returned in the kind 
 Teddy imagined a parson would best appreciate. 
 It was a genuine disappointment to Miss English that 
 
HIS FATHERHOOD 107 
 
 he never came again. His excuse was that he hadn't 
 time now he was a father. 
 
 And in truth he was absorbed in his child. Nothing 
 was too good for Meg: that was the principle on which he 
 went. 
 
 "He's more like a mother than a father," Loo said to 
 Miss English. "I could be quite jealous. I'm nowhere." 
 
 The other nodded in her firm bright way. 
 
 "It's improving him a lot," she said. "But keep him 
 in hand. Keep him in hand. They all want it." 
 
 Loo smiled at her. 
 
 "I do that, you may be sure, Miss. Wouldn't do to let 
 him have it all his own way." 
 
 The other shook her head. 
 
 " They none of 'em can stand it," she whispered. " Not 
 the best of 'em," and whisked off through the archway. 
 
 In those happy days Loo hardly knew which to be 
 proudest of — husband or child. 
 
 And indeed Meg was a jewel of a child. A small but 
 beautiful baby, with a pebble-like head, and round little 
 body and limbs, when she was born she had blue eyes and 
 a quantity of dark hair. The dark hair fell off, and little 
 Meg became almost bald. Teddy was anxious and went 
 round to see Doctor English about it, but the doctor reas- 
 sured him. Teddy had many such small worries. For 
 he watched the growth of his child with the most anxious 
 
108 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 interest; and the day she first smiled at him was the great 
 day of his life. 
 
 At night before he went to bed he would bend over 
 her cot, and again before going out to work in the morning. 
 And often as he stole out on tiptoe, so as not to disturb his 
 child, he would turn to find her smiling at him. 
 
 And the little cockney would stand in the dusk of the 
 door and blow his baby kisses, and then steal down- 
 stairs on hushed and happy toes. 
 
 He called her the Pride of the Archery, and on Sunday 
 mornings would walk up and down the street with her 
 among admiring mothers while Loo got ready to go out. 
 
 Then they would all three go down Mudsey Wall on 
 summer days and establish themselves on the tiny strip 
 of beach beside the river. 
 
 And there in her father's arms, as he sat upon the stone- 
 way, her eyes on the water, broad sweeping by in rhythm 
 of swift majestic motion, the child would quicken to a 
 strange and lovely life. She would chuckle and bubble 
 and dance and stretch out fat white arms to the elusive 
 stream as though to embrace it, to possess it for her baby 
 self, to beseech it to bear her away on its shining bosom. 
 
 "It's the steamers," said the prosaic Loo. 
 
 "Now 'tain't," answered Teddy. 
 
 "What is it then, old man?" 
 
 "What ain't it, ye mean!" answered Teddy, enig- 
 matically. 
 
HIS FATHERHOOD 109 
 
 He knew himself, but he could not utter what he knew 
 in words. 
 
 Twenty-five years before he, in his father's arms, on 
 one of London's bridges, had experienced that same 
 strange stir of emotion which kindled the new mind of 
 his returning child. 
 
 All there was of woman in Teddy, and there was much, 
 came out in his handling of his child. He was almost as 
 clever at dressing her as Loo, and could rock her to sleep 
 when her mother failed. 
 
 Meg was always good and happy in her father's arms, 
 and would lie a white bundle with a smiling face, one tiny 
 fist reaching forth to tug fiercely at the red moustache 
 that was her favourite toy. 
 
 "There ain't her like in London, it's my belief," Teddy 
 was fond of asserting. 
 
 Then Meg had to be vaccinated. 
 
 Teddy was dead against it. He resented the violation 
 of the body of his child even to the extent of a pin-prick. 
 It was for him a singularly offensive sort of sacrilege. 
 
 Doctor English was obdurate. 
 
 "As you wish, sir," said Teddy, pale and bitter; and 
 as soon as the doctor was gone applied his mouth to the 
 spot and sucked it. 
 
 "Leave enough to do her no 'arm and please the doc- 
 
110 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 tor," he remarked as he spat and slobbered over a basin. 
 Then Meg's teeth began to give trouble and there were 
 bad nights at No. 23. 
 
 The dawn often found Teddy with the shadows beneath 
 his eyes; but he never complained. 
 
 "He's like a saint," said Loo, and helped her baby's 
 teeth through with a hairpin. 
 
 When the nights were very bad he would sleep in the 
 trailer in the parlour. But as Meg grew, the trailer went 
 and a perambulator was bought instead. 
 
 The man at the shop where the exchange was made 
 chaffed Teddy and told him he was getting middle-aged. 
 
 "Straight, I am," Teddy admitted. "I've got a 
 young 'un." 
 
 And if to be middle-aged is to recognize that your own 
 life is no longer an end in itself but only a means of serving 
 the generation that is supplanting you, then Teddy was in 
 truth middle-aged. 
 
 He sold his trailer without a pang and bought in its 
 stead a pram. For Meg no mail-cart, or cube sugar-box 
 on makeshift wheels. She should have her pram like a 
 lady: a pram on springs, painted green, with a head you 
 could put up when it rained. 
 
 "Should 'ave a coronet on it," cried Teddy. "Then it 
 would be just all right." 
 
 And it pleased him none the less because it was the only 
 one in the Row. 
 
HIS FATHERHOOD 111 
 
 These were great days at No. 23. Work was constant 
 at Mapleton's. There was no overtime and little short 
 time. Teddy was earning good money and earning it 
 steadily. 
 
 There was no stinting at his home. Loo lived like a 
 lady. She wore a white blouse even in the morning with 
 a gold brooch at the collar. Teddy would not allow her 
 to take in a lodger — that was part of the man's pride. 
 And there was no reason why she should. All her energies 
 she devoted to her home, her husband, and her baby. 
 And it was difficult to say which of the three she kept 
 best. 
 
 The long brown rent book which plays so tragic a part 
 
 in the lives of the poor had no terrors for her. Of its three 
 
 columns 
 
 Rent | Received by | Due 
 
 the first was fat with figures, the second with initials, and 
 the third a noble blank. 
 
 On Monday morning when the collector of the Mudsey 
 Improved Artisans' Dwellings Company came round he 
 was always met with smiles at No. 23. That gentlemanly 
 young man with the tendency to mash was allowed to 
 take a friendly interest in Meg. 
 
 "Ain't she coming on?" he'd say. 
 
 "Ah, I dare say you see it more than we do, coming only 
 once a week, Mr. Browne," replied the proud mother. 
 
 Meg indeed bloomed and blossomed. 
 
112 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 A little soul began to shine and twinkle in her eyes. 
 She became articulate in clear wild ways. She would 
 crow and scream like a parrot. She would stretch out 
 blind arms to her daddy and smile at him suddenly and 
 sweetly from the deeps of blue eyes. There was meaning 
 in her little back as she lay slimy with soap upon her 
 mother's knee. She learned to turn over on the bed her- 
 self, and began to crawl. Her hair came again crisp and 
 curly this time; and the roses blew in her cheeks. 
 
 Even Miss English, critical always through her pince- 
 nez, admired. 
 
 Loo took no credit to herself. 
 
 "It's her daddy," she said. 
 
 "Has he joined a Friendly Society yet?" asked the 
 lady, who was nothing if not dogged. 
 
 " No, Miss. Not yet. He says he will when he's thirty. 
 Lots o' time, he says. See, he belongs to the Sick Club 
 at the works. It's less money. And there's the share- 
 out at Christmas." 
 
 Miss English shook her head. 
 
 "Make hay while the sun shines," she said. "It's an 
 old motto and a good one." 
 
 Teddy used to hurry home of evenings in time to be 
 present at the child's nightly tub. 
 
 And the little thing would lie face down on her mother s 
 lap, and squirm her head round and bubble and croon at 
 
HIS FATHERHOOD 113 
 
 her father as he tried the water in the foot-bath to see if 
 it was the right temperature. 
 
 Meg loved her bath. She drove herself to and fro 
 through the water, her deep-creased little thighs working 
 strenuously. 
 
 "Ain't she got a chest on her?" Teddy would say, ad- 
 miring. "Woa, the little kicker !" 
 
 And he would kneel at the head of the bath and use his 
 hand as a buffer to prevent her banging her head against 
 the side as she surged and swished to and fro with round 
 eyes and round mouth, rejoicing in her nakedness. 
 
 "It's a perfect little idyll, that home," said Doctor 
 English quietly to his sister one evening. 
 
 "Yes," she answered somewhat tartly. "I trust it'll 
 last." 
 
 " It'll last," said the doctor dreamily from the deeps of 
 his great chair. "It'll last. The beautiful always lasts." 
 
BOOK II 
 HIS DEATH 
 
PART I 
 PINCHED 
 
 There still remained an unhappy condition of men who endured the 
 weight, without sharing the benefits of, society. — Gibbon. 
 
 Walls, towers, and ships, they all 
 
 Are nothing with no man to keep the wall. — Sophocles. 
 
XI 
 
 THE HAPPY FAMILY 
 
 Though it was eight o'clock of a Monday morning 
 Teddy Hankey came trotting back from the factory; 
 and it was clear that it was not because he had been 
 dismissed. 
 
 There was a rare sparkle in his eyes; and he was aglow 
 with some spiritual excitement that lent colour and light 
 to the whole man. 
 
 He came bustling into his house with the warm busi- 
 ness of one who has before him work in which he rejoices. 
 
 Little Meg, now just five years old, stood in the kitchen, 
 the one dim ray of sunshine that pierced the house irra- 
 diating her. Loo knelt behind her brushing the child's 
 fair curls with fond caressing hands. 
 
 "Now then, father!" she chaffed. "I thought you 
 were never coming." 
 
 " I ain't late," cried Teddy. " 'Tain't eight yet. There, 
 it's going now." 
 
 As her father entered, Meg danced round and spread 
 wide her little arms. 
 
 "Daddy ! " she cried. " Quick ! Quick ! " 
 
 117 
 
118 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "'Ello, lovey!" laughed Teddy, bustling upstairs, and 
 taking off his coat as he went. " 'Alf a mo, then." 
 
 Something tremendous was forward at 23 Archery Row 
 this morning. 
 
 Baby Meg was about to leave home and take her first 
 plunge in the ocean- world awaiting her outside. And she 
 was keen to go, keen to wade out into those unknown 
 deeps, inexperienced in the perils and appalling loneliness 
 of them. 
 
 In a word, little Meg Hankey was about to go to 
 school. 
 
 The State had sent for her to take her baby soul and 
 train it to be sensitive before flinging it aside to be ground 
 to dust in the workshop of the hard world; and her daddy 
 had begged, borrowed, or stolen an hour from the factory 
 to take her to school himself. 
 
 Upstairs in the little bedroom Teddy beautified himself 
 as he had not done since he went courting. 
 
 He shaved, washed, scented his sparse red hair, and 
 brushed it. Then he donned his one white shirt and a 
 clean collar. The thin boots with the patent-leather toes 
 and the leaky soles which nobody would see, and the crack 
 in the side which a close and unkind observer would see, 
 were produced from beneath the bed. He took his 
 Sunday trousers from under the mattress, where they had 
 been pressing, and put them on with his black coat and 
 
THE HAPPY FAMILY 119 
 
 waistcoat, and a fresh new tie bought with care on 
 Saturday for the occasion. 
 
 "Daddy!" cried Meg continuously from below. "Are 
 you nee'ly weady?" 
 
 "Comin', duckie, comin'," called Teddy, busy with the 
 ends of his moustache. 
 
 "Doin' a nice mash in front of the glass, old man," 
 chaffed Loo. "I know ye." 
 
 "Must do the kid credit," cried Teddy sturdily. 
 "There's a lot in first impressions." 
 
 He came paddling softly down the stairs in his socks, 
 his boots in his hand. 
 
 Meg squealed as she saw him and held out chubby fists. 
 
 "Sunday daddy!" she cried. 
 
 Loo rose from her knees with laughing eyes. 
 
 "Tie-pin and all!" she said. "My eye! ain't he a 
 dook?" 
 
 "I'm the dandy torf all right," said Teddy, polishing 
 his boots. "Where's her shoes, mother?" 
 
 "I cleaned 'em myself," replied Loo. "She's got 'em 
 on." 
 
 "You!" scoffed Teddy. "Where's the good o' you? 
 Look at that! Call that cleaning 'em? What d'you 
 do it with — toothbrush? Here, duckie! Put your 
 foot up; and daddy '11 put a shine on it. Spit and 
 polish — that's the style. There! that's more like it, 
 ain't it?" 
 
no THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He stood up and Loo arranged a flower in his button- 
 hole. 
 
 "Won't you knock 'em just?" she chaffed. "Oh, my 
 stars!" 
 
 "There, that'll do," fussed Teddy. "Now the child." 
 
 Meg too was to be arrayed in her Sunday best by her 
 daddy's orders. 
 
 He crowned her golden curls with a little white fur cap, 
 beneath which her rosy face and blue eyes peeped rogu- 
 ishly. He buttoned her up in her sheepskin coat with 
 deft fingers, hung her imitation ermine muff about her 
 neck, arranged her rabbit-skin boa around her throat. 
 
 There were not many children in Mudsey who dressed 
 like that. 
 
 Loo stood by and watched with tender eyes. 
 
 Teddy lifted the child in his arms. 
 
 "Now give mummy a kiss. There! 
 
 " Now we're off to Louisiana, 
 For to see our Susy-anna, 
 Singing Polly-wolly-doodle all the way." 
 
 He gave a kick and a little skip. 
 
 Loo stood in the door and watched the pair prancing 
 down the street with smiling eyes, somewhat wistful. 
 
 "Be a good girl, now, Meg," she cried. "And do what 
 teacher tells you." 
 
 "She'll be as good as gold, won't you, Meg?" 
 
 "Don't you get her excited now, daddy." 
 
THE HAPPY FAMILY 121 
 
 "Not me," called Teddy. "She'll be steady as Well- 
 in'ton at Waterloo. " 
 
 Meg strutted down the street with little feet that pitter- 
 pattered beside her daddy's slow long legs. She would not 
 run to-day — it was beneath her dignity; she would walk. 
 She would not even take her daddy's hand. 
 
 "What, want to walk alone, duckie?" 
 
 She nodded mutely up at him, her mouth pursed and 
 proud; and bustled along very busy and important with 
 a great fuss of arms and legs and shoulders, and a tiny 
 pucker in her forehead. Every now and then the dignity 
 faded out of her face, the stiffness out of her limbs, and 
 she gurgled up at her daddy, rolling her body. 
 
 Women standing in their doors smiled at her as she 
 went like sunshine down the street. Some she cut; for 
 she was in haughty mood; others she waved to, and her 
 whole body seemed to chuckle laughter. 
 
 There was not a lovelier bit of life in South London that 
 day; and the children of South London are its chief est 
 beauty. In them you seem to see the sparkle of the soul 
 all the brighter for the dreary waste in which it burns — 
 a sparkle that is slowly quenched as the child emerges 
 into the boy and girl, and the weight and shadow of miser- 
 able circumstance fall upon the budding life to stunt and 
 darken it. 
 
 As they neared the school in South Lane Meg's little 
 
122 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 hand sought her father's, and one finger went to her 
 mouth. 
 
 There were boys and girls about the door, crowds of 
 boys and girls, most of them strangers, some of them big, 
 Big — many of them in rags, a few barefoot, none of them 
 arrayed as she was in her Sunday best. 
 
 Her little heart pattered, but she held on bravely, 
 throwing up her eyes to her father's to see that all was 
 well. 
 
 "It's all right, duckie," said Teddy with quick sym- 
 pathy. "They won't hurt you." 
 
 When they reached the school a teacher stood in the 
 door. She was a big and blooming young person, born 
 and bred on a farm in the country where milk and eggs 
 and fresh air were plentiful; and her face was kind. 
 
 "Brought my little girl along, Miss," said Teddy, 
 touching his hat. "Hankey — 23 Archery. Inspector 
 called in the other day." 
 
 The young woman put her hand upon the child's 
 shoulder. 
 
 "What's your name, dear?" 
 
 Meg was shy and looked at her toes. 
 
 "Answer the lydy, lovey," said her father. 
 
 "Margaret — Eleanor — Hankey," panted the child. 
 
 The young woman smiled at Teddy. 
 
 "I can see she comes from a good home," she said. 
 
 Teddy purred. 
 
THE HAPPY FAMILY 123 
 
 "Well, Miss, it's the mother makes the 'ome. And 
 she's got a good mother. See! Not as I won't say but 
 we've tried to bring her up nice." 
 
 "I'm sure you have," said the young woman. "Well, 
 I'll take her in to Governess now. We shall take good 
 care of her." 
 
 Teddy wiped his mouth and kissed the child. 
 
 "Go along with the lydy, Meg," he said. "And do 
 what she tells you, lovey.' 
 
 The little creature disappeared into the school, her 
 white-coated body, thick and furry as a willow-bud, 
 huddled close against the young teacher's dark dress. 
 
 Teddy's eyes were tender as he watched her disappear. 
 
 His little Meg was leaving him. She had dropped his 
 hand and would walk now by herself — always drawing 
 farther and farther away. 
 
 What was happening in his heart, and why it was hap- 
 pening, he did not seek to fathom; but he dimly felt that 
 he had lost something, and something very precious to 
 him; that a new element was stealing in upon his life — 
 a foreign element, unknown and therefore dangerous; and 
 that things would never be again quite what they had 
 been. Somehow the Future had thrust a knife into his 
 heart, and severed from him something that was dearer to 
 him than himself. 
 
 As he trotted home he met Doctor English. 
 
 The great doctor got off his bicycle in some concern. 
 
124 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Hullo, Ted! what you doing out here this time in the 
 morning? Not out of work." 
 
 "No, sir. Been seem' Meg off to school for the first 
 
 time." 
 
 His eyes were shy and smiling. 
 
 "Ah," said the other quietly. "Your wife'll miss her." 
 He mounted his bicycle and rode off, humming to himself. 
 
 Teddy followed with affectionate eyes the bowed and 
 burly figure of the big man with the mysterious bloom of 
 a mountain upon him. He knew that tune. It brought 
 back to him memories of old days in the night school in 
 Farthing Lane, the big doctor prancing round the room, 
 with knees uplifted, and face aglow, half-a-hundred hooli- 
 gans of Mudsey stamping behind him, as they piped on 
 penny whistles: 
 
 John Brown's Body lies a-mouldering in the dust, 
 But his soul goes marching on. 
 
XII 
 THE SHADOW 
 
 Teddy returned to Loo at a trot, a twinkle in his eye. 
 Shutting the door behind him with elaborate mystery, he 
 stole across to her upon his toes. 
 
 "'/ can see she come from a good 'ome,' she says," he 
 whispered, tickling the back of his wife's neck. 
 
 The mother's cheeks were warm with joy, and she 
 breathed deep. 
 
 "Is that what she say?" asked Loo. 
 
 "Straight. Them very words. Bible-truth. '/ can 
 see she come from a good y ome* she says. And so she do, 
 says I. Aint it the mother as makes the 'ome?" 
 
 He put his arms about his wife and kissed her. 
 She met him with eyes bright and tender as his 
 own. 
 
 " She should ha' said — / can see she come of a good 
 father," Loo answered. "That's what she should ha' 
 said really by rights. Only there wasn't no need — seeing 
 she had you before her eyes?" She dwelt on her delight. 
 "Who was it you saw?" 
 
 " One of the teachers. Such a mighty big young woman. 
 
 125 
 
126 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Make three o' you. Reg'lar prize gal. Stuff'd up on 
 Nestle's milk all her life, I should fancy." 
 
 "With a mole on her cheek?" said Loo. "I know. 
 That's Miss Harper. They all like her. She takes the 
 infants under Governess. Meg'U be along with her. 
 . . . And she said that, did she?" 
 
 "Straight she did. 'I can see she come from a good 
 9 ome,' she says." 
 
 He ran upstairs and donned his working-clothes, ex- 
 changing confidences and commonplaces with Loo below 
 as he did so. 
 
 "Show'd some of 'em up, I can tell you. Made 'em 
 look quite common alongside our Meg." 
 
 "They wasn't in their Sundays, the others," said the 
 just Loo. 
 
 " Sundays or week-days don't make no difference," 
 retorted Teddy confidently. "It was her. It wasn't 
 the duds. Different as chalk from cheese. Made some 
 of 'em stare, I can tell you." 
 
 And he laughed as he recalled tiny incidents of the 
 adventure, meaningless to an outsider, to the father and 
 mother full of beautiful significance. 
 
 Then he came bustling downstairs in his dingy working- 
 duds, looking different — older, duller. 
 
 The light had left his face, and there was a look of strain 
 upon it. She marked how slight he looked; how shallow 
 was his chest; how thin his legs. 
 
THE SHADOW 127 
 
 "Good-bye, old gal," he said. "It's back to the 
 blamed old machine. No peace for the worker in this 
 world." And he shuffled off down the dismal street. 
 
 In the days of Teddy Hankey a Great Idea, vague as 
 yet, was flickering in the hearts of millions — such an 
 Idea slow-fermenting as had led to the rise of Christianity. 
 But in this case the Idea was not confined to a few coun- 
 tries or a single continent. It was world-wide. Europe 
 and America were stirred by it; and the East was not un- 
 touched. It broke in mysterious waves on the far shores 
 of the Yellow Sea, and the Persian Gulf was ruffled by it. 
 In the West it was the old Idea of Liberty for which men 
 and nations had striven and died, merging slowly in the 
 larger Idea of Love. 
 
 It affected every class and every country. Amidst 
 the rich it revealed itself in an ever-growing uneasiness of 
 conscience. 
 
 And in the hearts of the workers it made itself felt in a 
 dim discontent with mean lives passed in the shadow of 
 oppressive circumstance, a heaving of the multitudinous 
 bosom of labour throughout the world. 
 
 Teddy Hankey down in Mudsey beside the old brown 
 river was aware of it unconsciously. 
 
 Like many of the cockney class Teddy was cursed with 
 an Imagination. And that noblest of all qualities, which 
 
128 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 distinguishes man from the beasts, and makes him one 
 with God, was in him a defect. 
 
 His temperament was much like his hair — feverish 
 and wearing thin. Somewhat neurotic, had he been a 
 member of the State-supported classes at the top, he 
 would have been the subject of rest cures. But Teddy 
 Hankey was not State-supported. He had to support 
 himself, his family, and help to bear upon his shoulders 
 the immense burthen of those tens of thousands who can 
 lie in bed all day if they like, and be fed, nursed, doctored, 
 housed, amused, at the expense of the community. 
 
 Therefore he could not afford the luxury of a break- 
 down. Instead he aged very rapidly. There was no 
 gray in his hair at thirty, but his scalp shone through his 
 red locks. The skin about his forehead was loose; the 
 wrinkles had gathered round his eyes; and those eyes had 
 lost their sparkle, and grown strained and anxious. 
 
 A man of the same mind in a stronger body would have 
 read, worked, and wriggled out of the ranks of those who 
 live by their hands into the ranks of those who live by their 
 brains. As it was when he came home of evenings from 
 the factory, after his thirteen hours in the stench of raw 
 hides, he had no energy to spare for books and study. 
 What little was left in him went to Meg and her amuse- 
 ment. 
 
 And when the child had gone to bed he would sit for 
 hours in silence, his hands deep in his pockets, his stock 
 
THE SHADOW 129 
 
 inged toes upon the fender, his eyes upon the fire, musing. 
 Loo, stirring about the kitchen, would watch him anx- 
 ious as a mother over an ailing child. 
 
 "What is it, dad?" 
 
 His answer never varied. It was: 
 
 "I got thinking." 
 
 It was not peculiar to him, that trouble. It was com- 
 mon to the workers all the world over. 
 
 They got thinking. 
 
 That thing was coming to Teddy Hankey which comes 
 in our day to most men of his class and comes increasingly. 
 He was beginning to Doubt. And his was not the doubt 
 of the upper classes at the West-end of the town — the 
 doubt in an abstract God, the doubt that may be an intel- 
 lectual luxury. His was the real, intimate, and most 
 terrible doubt of the man who loses his faith in Life — 
 here and now. 
 
 It was the trouble of all the workers throughout the 
 world — a sense of insecurity creeping into their hearts, 
 shrouding them like a poisonous mist, blighting them, 
 hugging them, stifling them, throttling the joy in them, 
 winding about them python-wise, slaying their bodies, 
 and undoing their souls. 
 
 Where are we? — that was the myriad-throated shout 
 which rose from the great cities throughout the world. 
 
 And the answer came echoing back — 
 
130 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 You are in the air — one shaky strand of rope between 
 them and the Abyss over which they hung. 
 
 And was that one strand trustworthy? 
 
 A man had but to walk down the street to get the answer 
 to that question. There on all sides he would see the 
 bodies of those who had fallen — the strand of rope some- 
 times broken, sometimes cut; and he could hear the shouts 
 of men and women plunging down into the Aybss. 
 
 Those who had not fallen dangled, seeking solid earth 
 with feet that pawed the unresisting air. They had 
 nothing beneath them to give them confidence in them- 
 selves and each other. Something had crept insidiously 
 between them and the old brown mother from whom they 
 sprang, to whom they belonged, and who belonged to them 
 of natural right — something invisible, intangible, yet very 
 strong and deadly. 
 
 Swiney spoke of it as Capital. 
 
 That slow unveiling of his economic eyes which comes 
 to-day to every intelligent worker, when the first flash of 
 youth has died away, and he begins to feel the weight of 
 the yoke upon his neck, seeing life no longer as a game but 
 as a grim reality, was coming to Teddy Hankey. 
 
 The Future was opening before him, a Future of work, 
 work, work — if he was among the lucky ones; endless 
 labour, always dull, without recreation, without inter- 
 misssion, without reward, and above all without security. 
 
THE SHADOW 131 
 
 "Talk about the dignity of labour," Swiney was fond 
 of saying. "Why, it's brutalizing — that's what it is." 
 
 Endless labour for forty years — and only that if he 
 was among the lucky ones. 
 
 And if he was not? 
 
 That question often haunted Teddy now of nights. 
 
 The State had educated him. It had given him eyes 
 with which to see. And he saw as his blind forbears could 
 not. And what he saw was the Abyss. The State had 
 quickened his heart and made it sensitive to the horror of 
 that Abyss, as he skirted it for ever with impending toe; 
 and it had not given him the wherewithal to bridge the 
 chasm or fill it up. 
 
 It had opened the view to him, and then forbidden him 
 to enter on the Promised Land. The dreams it had 
 aroused in his mind remained unfulfilled. It had tempted, 
 but it had not satisfied. The window was wide; but 
 the door was shut, the door of opportunity. Men stood 
 at that window and saw and sighed. Many of them mut- 
 tered. Some of them rattled the handle of the closed door. 
 The Hope the State had roused was the Mother of the 
 Disappointment it seemed unable to assuage and the 
 Anxiety it could not diminish. 
 
 "What's the future 'old for you and me?" Swiney 
 would say, as they bowed their heads over the splitting- 
 machine. 
 
 "Why, five bob a week at seventy," chirped Teddy, who 
 
132 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 had been momentarily cheered of late by the passing of 
 the belated Pensions Act. 
 
 "And who's going to live to be seventy at this job?" 
 scoffed Swiney. "Think they'd give you a pension if 
 they thought you'd live to enjoy it? — not they! Pay 
 'emselves; pension 'emselves. But the workers! Bleed 
 the life out o' you, and when you're no more use to 'em, 
 chuck you. We aren't men. We're menials — and 
 meant to be. That's what the workers are. Any Im- 
 perialist '11 tell you that." 
 
 Swiney's hold on the other's life had increased greatly 
 of late years. Not seldom the two attended political 
 meetings together. On one such occasion an irascible 
 old gentleman upon a Conservative platform, on being 
 heckled, lost his temper and exploded. 
 
 "The curse of this country," he shouted, "is that the 
 workingmen are too well educated." 
 
 Swiney turned to Teddy. 
 
 "Now you've got it straight," he whispered. "What 
 ye think o' that?" 
 
 "Why — fine!" said Teddy, whose language was apt to 
 take its colour from his friend. 
 
 "That's it, my boy," said Swiney, bitter triumph in 
 his eyes. "We're beginning to know." 
 
 And Swiney was right. 
 
 Teddy was beginning to know. 
 
 And what he was beginning to know was that he was 
 
THE SHADOW 133 
 
 hanging on a thread over the Abyss — and that at any 
 moment the thread might be cut or break. 
 
 It was this sense of insecurity that was turning Teddy, 
 the flippant cockney, into the haggard man with the dis- 
 contented eyes who is the worker of to-day. 
 
 Sometimes he would rise and going to the window would 
 listen to the immense hum and under-mutter of the great 
 city swirling in league-long flood all about his frail skiff 
 of a home. 
 
 "It's a rum 'un," he would growl. 
 
 "What is, old man?" Loo would ask. 
 
 "This bag o' tricks they call a world." And he would 
 pull back the blind and peer out into the dingy lamp-lit 
 street. "Blest if I can make much of it." 
 
 A great dumb question haunted his heart. 
 
 What was the meaning of it all? 
 
 More and more Teddy came to see through the eyes of 
 Swiney. And what he saw was the parson and the police- 
 man as the two arch-protagonists in the Great Conspiracy 
 of the rich against the poor. 
 
 For years he had ignored the State, which had ignored 
 him. Now he began to be aware of it — as something 
 huge and dim and hostile; and the Church was there to 
 sanctify the State in its sin. 
 
 It was a favourite saying of Swiney's that a workingman 
 had no country 
 
134 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Talk about our duty to fight for our country !" he 
 would say. "All very well if you've got a country. We 
 ain't. Give us a country, I says. Give us a stake in it. 
 You've got it all now. Of course you want to fight. 
 You've got somethin' to lose: give us somethin'. Give us 
 a country; and then we'll show you whether we can fight 
 too. As it is they talk about our duties and forget about 
 our rights. Ye see they've snaffled the rights, and they 
 want to pile the duties on us." 
 
 More than a streak of the other's bitterness now tainted 
 Teddy's heart. 
 
 He began to realize that he was not a free man walking 
 the earth and rejoicing in his liberty; but a tiny cog in an 
 immense machine without a heart over which he had no 
 control and in the profits of whose labours he hardly 
 shared; and that if he ceased to run easily and well the 
 Engineer with the Grimy Fingers would remove him from 
 his bearings and chuck him on the scrap-heap. 
 
 That sense had come to Teddy Hankey which comes 
 increasingly to millions in our day — the sense that he 
 did not belong. 
 
 He felt himself a foreigner on earth. 
 
xm 
 
 A GLIMPSE OF THE ABYSS 
 
 And Teddy had more than a little ground for depres- 
 sion and anxiety. 
 
 The leather-trade had been going down for years in 
 Mudsey. A few of the small factories still kept going 
 briskly; but of the old giant firms that in the past had been 
 the mainstay of Mudsey's workers two only kept their 
 heads above water. 
 
 Some had gone under; others had moved into the 
 country. 
 
 Mapleton's stood its ground — always more insecurely. 
 
 The firm was being squeezed out by younger firms and 
 newer methods. 
 
 Old Mr. Mapleton was too conservative; young Mr. 
 Mapleton altogether too soft. Rates and taxes were 
 always rising. The County Council was continually 
 harrying the management in regard to the smells from the 
 dung-pits in the yard. Hides were at 6|d. a lb., and 
 wages tended to go up. 
 
 Old Mr. Mapleton had been saying for some years past 
 that he was running the works as a charity. 
 
 135 
 
136 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 It was little wonder that the worried look deepened in 
 Teddy's eyes. 
 
 He grew thinner and his cough became worse. 
 
 Of evenings now even Meg could not always rouse him. 
 
 "Daddy's changed," the little thing complained to her 
 mother. "He doesn't jig." 
 
 Loo told her husband, as he sat staring into the fire. 
 
 "' Daddy's changed,' she says." 
 
 "And perhaps daddy's got something to change him," 
 answered Teddy. 
 
 Something in his voice caught her attention. She bent 
 over him. 
 
 "What is it, old man?" 
 
 "They're turning off some of the hands again." 
 
 "Well, they won't turn you off," she cried comfort- 
 ably. "You've worked there since you was a boy." 
 
 Teddy shook his head. 
 
 "You never know from one day to the next. That's 
 where it is. I might be out any day. It's the same all 
 over the shop. Boys doing women's work; and women 
 doing men's; and the men — emigrate!" He flared bit- 
 terly. "Lots o' room in England for aliens. None for 
 Englishmen. And then they talk about your country! 
 Plucky lot o' country a workingman's got. Swiney's 
 right there." 
 
 Then one evening as he left the yard he found a body of 
 his mates clustered at the gate talking. 
 
A GLIMPSE OF THE ABYSS 137 
 
 Swiney beckoned to him. 
 
 "You'eard,Ted?" 
 
 "What then?" 
 
 "Hacket's closed down." 
 
 Hacket's was the huge rival leather-works down the 
 river. 
 
 Teddy felt inclined to crow. Ever since he had been 
 in the trade, Hacket's and Mapleton's had been cutting 
 each other's throats with furious zeal. 
 
 "Well, that won't 'urt us, will it?" he said with some- 
 thing of the old cocky snap in his voice. "We'll get all 
 their work, won't we?" 
 
 "No, ye fat-head!" said Swiney. "He don't see what 
 it means, old Ted don't." 
 
 "What does it mean then?" 
 
 The fat young man wagged a professional finger. 
 
 "Why, it means just this: five hundred men in our trade 
 out o' work ready to step into your shoes or mine. That's 
 what it means, old cock." He strolled off. "That's the 
 masters' game — that is. Surplus Labour. Sweat you 
 down. 'Take what I offer you or go. There 9 s plenty to fill 
 your place at my price. 9 " 
 
 The implication in the last words was quite unjust to 
 Mapleton's, who had always been good employers. But 
 Swiney was far too bitter to be just. In his eyes a man's 
 one unpardonable crime was to be a master — or to be- 
 long to the class from which masters sprang. 
 
138 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Teddy walked home thoughtfully and told Loo. 
 
 "If my 'ealth was to go now," he said. "That's 
 all." 
 
 "Your 'ealth won't go now, you old cockchafer," said 
 Loo, rising gallantly on the wave that was swamping 
 her husband. "You're all right; only you get so broody. 
 Here, Meg, go and cheer your daddy up." 
 
 And he forgot his troubles in her curls 
 
 Thereafter the gates of the yard were crowded by hag- 
 gard men out of work. 
 
 As Teddy lay in bed he could hear them trooping by in 
 the darkness. They were early birds — waiting for his 
 worm. The thought of it stung him; and he would get 
 up long before he need because of it. He knew the gates 
 were not open till 5.30; but the sense that those others 
 were there, hundreds of them, waiting to pounce upon his 
 place, kept him on the stretch. 
 
 Every morning and every evening Teddy and his 
 mates shoved through that hungry, dingy, patient crowd. 
 And some who were there at dawn when he went in were 
 still there at dusk when he went out. 
 
 "We're keepin' 'em out — that's what we're doing," 
 said Swiney with the cheerful bitterness peculiar to him. 
 "We're tramplin' on our own class, you and me. We're 
 keepin' the bread out of the mouths of their wives and 
 children. And we're doin' it not because we want to 
 
A GLIMPSE OF THE ABYSS 139 
 
 do it, but because we got to. What d'ye think o' that 
 now?" 
 
 " rum," muttered Teddy. 
 
 "Ah," continued the other. "I've been in the Com- 
 petitive War for sixteen years. And all that time I've 
 been tramplin' on my own mates same as I am now — 
 because I know if I didn't, they'd trample on me. Forced 
 to it. Couldn't help myself. If I was to give out now, 
 there's a hundred men waiting for my job. What's it to 
 the masters who does the work so long as somebody does 
 it? What's Mapleton care for me? Why, as much as I 
 care for 'im. Love and religion! Talk that to the plu- 
 tocracy. I've worked for 'im for seven year, and I'll lay 
 he don't know me by sight." 
 
 "Mapleton's all right," said Teddy somewhat testily. 
 "If you study him, he'll study you. Leave him alone. 
 Where's the cure? That's what I want to know." 
 
 The fat young man began to wag his finger. 
 
 "There's two ways out of this hole, my boy," he said 
 confidentially. " Educate the intellectuals — and you'll 
 never do that; or else combine yourselves." 
 
 "Combine!" scoffed Teddy. "Where's the sense o* 
 combinin' against them? They've Might on their side: 
 we've nothing only Right on ours. They got it all. We 
 got nothing. 
 
 "They got it all, I grant you," retorted Swiney. "But 
 can't we make 'em drop it? Ain't there millions and 
 
140 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 millions of us — all the world over? Proletarians unite 
 — and it's done." He squared his shoulders. "I tell 
 you what. If workin'men wasn't such — fools, maybe 
 the world might be worth living in for the workers." 
 
 A few months later there was a sensation in the neigh- 
 bourhood of Archery Row, where sensations were by no 
 means rare. A thing that happened in a room in Para- 
 dise Court, one of the alleys through the archway not two 
 hundred yards from Teddy's door, reverberated through 
 the Kingdom. 
 
 It was talked of everywhere; and for forty-eight hours 
 Mudsey found itself famous. 
 
 One of Hacket's men had committed suicide. He had 
 hung himself in his own room. Pinned on his breast as 
 he dangled with limp neck and scraping toes was a paper. 
 The paper was read at the inquest; and there was a fac- 
 simile of it in the Daily Mail. It ran thus: 
 
 I've 'ad enough. There's no room for me in this world. So I'll try 
 another. I'm squeezed out. For thirty year I worked at Hacket's and 
 never a word. Four months since they closed down. I was throw'd 
 out at fifty-six. Since then I've been looking for a job. I'm too old. 
 The committee offered me a job hammering clinkers. My heart's bad. 
 Couldn't do it. I've sold up all my sticks and got through the bit I'd 
 saved. My soles are wore away looking for work that ain't there and 
 my soul's wore out. If there is a job there's fifty men younger nor me 
 and stronger to jump into it. And I can't emigrate at my age. I ain't 
 agoin' nigh Starkie not for to beg. I know 'im. There's nothing for it 
 but the Workhouse alongside of all sorts for me and the wife and the 
 
A GLIMPSE OF THE ABYSS 141 
 
 children what I've brought up respectable. I shouldn't be forced to it. 
 It isn't right. So I'm off. Once I'm gone the Board must do something 
 for my wife and children without forcing them in there where it's blas- 
 pheming and filth all the time. May God forgive me. He knows I 
 
 done my best. 
 
 Jas. Allen. 
 
 The thing was talked of everywhere for twenty-four 
 hours; and not least at Mapleton's. The men read the 
 letter in their dinner-hour at the works and discussed the 
 case. 
 
 One man had known the suicide; another's wife had 
 been the first called in; another had run for Miss English 
 and her brother. The victim was in their own trade, and 
 had been crushed by circumstances that might crush 
 them. Therefore it came home to them. 
 
 Teddy read and reread the letter, licking his lips. 
 
 "Who's Starkie?" he asked at last. 
 
 "Relieving Officer," said Swiney. 
 
 "Chap with a chin?" 
 
 "That's 'im. Struts. Bag. You know." He mim- 
 icked the walk of the Relieving Officer. 
 
 A sea-green mist had invaded Teddy's face. Years 
 ago he had known a Relieving Officer — a man with a 
 bag, who came and went and left tears behind him. 
 
 "I know him," said Teddy. 
 
 "Ah, don't you, my boy?" grinned Swiney. "You'll 
 regret it." 
 
 Some of the men sniggered. 
 
142 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Teddy paid no heed. He was rereading the letter, 
 silent and intent. 
 
 "Makes you think a bit, don't it?" said Swiney flip- 
 pantly. " What d'ye make of it? " 
 
 Teddy answered nothing; but he cut out the account of 
 the inquest in the Daily Mail, and a picture relating to the 
 matter in the Mirror, and pinned them to the wall of the 
 kitchen. 
 
 Once or twice Loo found him standing before them. 
 
 "That's queer stuff you got up there, daddy," she said. 
 
 "Ah, you leave that alone," retorted Teddy shortly. 
 
 On the following Saturday, when she was cleaning up, 
 Loo removed them. 
 
 Teddy noticed it at once on his return home and 
 rounded on her. 
 
 "Where's them papers?" 
 
 She had never known him so fierce, and for once quailed 
 before the squall of his wrath. 
 
 "I took 'em down, Teddy," she said. "Seem'd such 
 queer stuff to have up there. Melancholy like." 
 
 He strode across to her. 
 
 "What you done with 'em?" 
 
 It was almost as though he could have struck her. She 
 essayed to assert herself and failed. For the first time in 
 her married life she went down before him in utter col- 
 lapse. She saw in his face something she had never seen 
 there before, something that frightened her — a flash of 
 
A GLIMPSE OF THE ABYSS 143 
 
 steel, a hint of danger and darkness, she knew not what of 
 cruelty and terror. 
 
 Little Meg reflected the sudden change in her daddy 
 by huddling up against her mummy's skirt and whimper- 
 ing. 
 
 "There! you made her cry!" gasped Loo. 
 
 "What you done with 'em?" ruthlessly. 
 
 "I burnt 'em, Teddy." 
 
 She sat down and began to weep. 
 
 He stood over her with vengeful eyes. 
 
 "I'll learn you to burn my papers," he muttered. 
 
 Meg reached forth a tiny fist and beat him in baby rage. 
 
 "Bad daddy," she screamed. "Bad! Bad." 
 
 Teddy took the child in his arms. She kicked furiously 
 to be free. He sat her down, and she ran to her mother. 
 
 Muttering still, Teddy sat down and rewrote the whole 
 of the suicide's letter from memory with barely a comma 
 wrong and pinned it upon the wall. 
 
 Next day he asked Swiney in to see his handiwork. 
 
 "That's all right, ain't it?" said the fat young man. 
 "He's coming on, ain't he, Mrs. Hankey?" 
 
 Loo said nothing. 
 
 And it was not till a week had passed that Teddy de- 
 stroyed the papers himself, and coming to his wife with 
 tears in his eyes asked her to forgive him. 
 
XIV 
 TAP-TAP 
 
 Circumstance was slowly squeezing the joy out of 
 Teddy's soul; and he was changing apace beneath the 
 gradual pressure of hostile environment. 
 
 Nobody noticed it much but Loo; and she noticed it a 
 great deal. 
 
 Teddy was not so dainty as he had been, not so nice — 
 in his words, his manners, his bearing toward her. He 
 did not wash so regularly. Sometimes he went for days 
 unshorn. Now he was shabby where once he had been 
 neat. The pride was dying out of the man. As often 
 as not he never wore a collar for a week, winding a wrapper 
 about his neck instead. Miss English, who saw all things 
 through those gold-rimmed pince-nez of hers, remarked it. 
 
 "He's getting very slack," she told her brother. "All 
 his ends are showing." 
 
 "They're going through bad times at Mapleton's," 
 said the doctor. "It's telling on him. He was always 
 anxious-minded." 
 
 "And he's telling on her," said Miss English, who was 
 very much a feminist, though dead against the Suffrage. 
 
 144 
 
TAP-TAP 145 
 
 Loo would not admit to anybody and least of all to 
 Miss English that Teddy was deteriorating, but the sense 
 of it was there. 
 
 And Meg noticed it too. 
 
 If the child was no less to her father, her father was 
 certainly less to the child. 
 
 When he came home of evenings she no longer rushed to 
 clamber to his knee and scramble over him. She came 
 when he called her. And until he called her, she stayed 
 where she was in her own particular corner of the kitchen 
 on her grubby little hands and knees, playing with her 
 bits of coloured carboard and old dolls. 
 
 And Teddy marked the difference and felt it; but not so 
 much as he would have done a year or two back. 
 
 He was losing his edge. Something of the old fas- 
 tidiousness, the nice sensitiveness that had distinguished 
 him during his early married years, was lacking in him 
 now. 
 
 He was more ordinary, more like a common man. 
 
 Many of his not ignoble abnegations, his little charm- 
 ing ways, those twists of speech and tricks of manner 
 that make women love, he had abandoned quietly one 
 by one. 
 
 Loo got less, and therefore gave less. 
 
 Did she love less? 
 
 His practice of smoking cigarettes was growing on him 
 too. 
 
146 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Doctor English, who hated tobacco as he hated alcohol, 
 noticed it with grave disapproval. 
 
 "Always sucking a fag nowadays, Teddy," he said one 
 day, catching the other up in the street. 
 
 "Yes, sir," answered Teddy with a kind of shame- 
 faced brazenness. "Seems to ease me cough a bit." 
 
 The great doctor rolled slowly on, shaking his massive 
 head, and reported it to his sister that evening. 
 
 "I hope he's not going to pieces," he said. 
 
 "He was always very weak," replied his sister. "His 
 wife's twice the man." 
 
 Her brother deep in his great chair gazed long and 
 sombrely into the fire. 
 
 "All he wants is backing — now" he said. "And he 
 won't get it." 
 
 Throughout his thirty years of practice in Mudsey he 
 had been compelled to stand by and look on while homes 
 were being broken up, families disintegrated, souls lost, 
 the treausre of the nation lavishly spilt, for lack of support 
 and discipline scientifically applied by the Community to 
 its fainting members in the early hours of their necessity. 
 
 "If he goes wrong now it's largely his own fault," said 
 Miss English firmly. "I've seen him hobnobbing with a 
 bookie outside the Brighton Arms again of late." 
 
 Her brother knelt and stoked the fire. 
 
 "And what's driving him to hobnob with the bookie?" 
 he asked. 
 
TAP-TAP 147 
 
 Weakness," said Miss English. 
 "Worry, you mean," retorted her brother. 
 Miss English looked determined. 
 
 "I shall go round to-morrow and see Mrs. Hankey," 
 she said; and she did. 
 
 There was not much to see, but a good deal to feel; and 
 Miss English, unimaginative Englishwoman though she 
 was, felt it. Her soul of a woman was dimly aware of the 
 sufferings of this other woman, none the less touching 
 because they were unuttered. Loo was graver, older, 
 thinner. Her cheeks were less round and beginning to be 
 lined. She smiled less and was distinctly shabbier. 
 Instead of a white blouse with a brooch she wore a brown 
 jersey, and her bare arms were red-elbowed and no longer 
 plump. Time had been at work on her too. The old 
 softness was being hammered out of her upon the Anvil 
 of Circumstance. She was hardening. The gentle Loo 
 was sterner, less sweet, bracing herself, it seemed, and put- 
 ting on her armour to battle with adversity. The dimple 
 had died out of her ©heek, and all that the dimple meant. 
 The sweetheart was fading into the warrior. 
 
 The home too was changed, yet unchanged. Miss 
 English missed something — the old joy, the old sense of 
 sunshine, that had always made it good to step out of the 
 street into this house which was first and foremost a Home. 
 It was like a f amiliar summer landscape suddenly plunged 
 
148 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 into winter. It was dull, dull — the same, yet not the 
 same. A desolate wind had breathed on the brightness of 
 it and tarnished its old-time splendour. Yet there was 
 no outward difference except that the windows were shut, 
 and there was a slightly stuffy smell. 
 
 Miss English commented on it. 
 
 "Yes, Miss," said Loo. "It's Teddy. Says it makes 
 his cough worse." 
 
 "I should keep them open," said Miss English. 
 "There's nothing like fresh air for a cold. How's Meg?" 
 
 The lady had a glimpse of the old dimpling Loo. 
 
 "Oh, bonnie, Miss." 
 
 "And is her father as fond of her as he was?" 
 
 "Well, Miss," said Loo, evasively, "perhaps he don't 
 pay hardly so much attention to her as he did. Wouldn't, 
 ye see. A man. She's not so new-like as she used 
 to be." 
 
 The two women looked at each other. Miss English 
 had a way of perching her gold-rimmed pince-nez on her 
 nose that gave her shrewd brown eyes a cold and critical 
 air. 
 
 "And how is Teddy?" 
 
 The other's face clouded again. 
 
 "It's the work, Miss. So uncertain. Never know 
 where you are from one day to the next. It's wearing 
 him down to nothing." 
 
 And Loo told her of his worries. 
 
TAP-TAP 149 
 
 "Pity he doesn't go to church sometimes," said Miss 
 English. "Take his thoughts off." 
 
 "He'll never do that," answered Loo. "He seems very 
 bitter like against the church. Says it's humbugging the 
 workingman." 
 
 "He'd be better there than betting outside public- 
 houses anyway," said Miss English harshly. 
 
 Loo denied the charge roundly; but she knew there was 
 some truth in it. 
 
 Indeed that very night a man came round mysteriously 
 to the door. Teddy went to him; and the two talked a 
 while in stealthy whispers in the street. 
 
 "I wouldn't 'ave nothing to do with that chap, Ted," 
 said Loo gently when he returned. 
 
 He blustered. 
 
 "Mayn't a chap have his friends then?" 
 
 "If they are good ones," Loo answered. 
 
 He stared at her with lowering eyes. 
 
 "'Ere! don't you say a word against my friends," he 
 muttered. "That's altogether too much." 
 
 The relations between husband and wife were chang- 
 ing as they changed. The river had passed out of their 
 common life, and much with it. It no longer ran in and 
 out of the hearts of both, intertwining them with silver 
 links. They passed no more Sundays on their shore. 
 
150 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 When Teddy visited the river now he visited it alone. It 
 drew him still, this siren that had charmed millions to its 
 banks; but now there was an almost fatal quality about its 
 fascination for him. He no longer loved it; he began to 
 fear it, seeing it as an enemy in sinister disguise, whom he 
 could not resist. Often he would brood over its speed- 
 ing mystery with set teeth, hissing slightly. And once, 
 seized by a sudden passion, he snatched a pebble at his 
 feet and flung it at the river violently as though to drive 
 it out of his life. The stone struck the gliding water with 
 a dull plug; and Teddy turned his back upon it and fled 
 home. 
 
 There a new element was making itself felt — the ele- 
 ment of Force. Teddy and Loo were drawing away from 
 each other, unwinding from within as it were, to approach 
 again from without — their Wills for Weapons. The 
 Ego in each was stirring and aware of the Ego in the 
 other. And the Ego is the cuckoo in the nest of home. 
 
 Teddy was now being tried and tested to the core. 
 The Great Critic was at work on him, the Great Critic 
 with the Auger Eye, who finds us all out in the end — 
 boring down into our deeps, exposing us to the soul. He 
 worked like a woodpecker, tap-tapping up and down the 
 tree, finding the soft places in the bark, and plunging his 
 remorseless beak into the hearts of them. 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
TAP-TAP 151 
 
 The Woodpecker was at work on Teddy Hankey, 
 searching him out, body and soul. 
 
 Beneath the attacks of that relentless beak certain old 
 weaknesses of his began to be exposed. 
 
 Since he married he had been in the habit of giving Loo 
 thirty-five shillings a week regularly for housekeeping and 
 rent. 
 
 One Saturday he gave her twenty. 
 
 She looked at him and said nothing, her lips compressed. 
 
 He tried to brazen it out. 
 
 "A bit short this week," he said. "Bad times." 
 
 "There's Meg's new shoes," Loo reminded him; and 
 he felt her resisting him. 
 
 "I know," he said shortly. "Make it up next week." 
 
 A few days later as she scrubbed her doorstep at midday 
 she was amazed to see him coming down the street. 
 
 Her heart shrank, and she rose from her knees. 
 
 He saw her and began to swagger and whistle rather 
 recklessly. 
 
 "You're not out, Ted?" she asked. 
 
 "Not me!" cockily. "Took half a day off. That's 
 all. Ain't 'ad a spree since I was married." 
 
 He was tired of enduring, weary of pain, snatching for re- 
 lief. And simple fellow that he was he knew nothing of that 
 wise old monk who wrote five hundred years before his day: 
 
 If thou fling away one cross, without doubt thou wilt find another, and 
 perhaps a heavier. 
 
152 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Twenty minutes later he came downstairs dressed as 
 she had not seen him for years — collar, tie, tie-pin, the 
 billycock with the narrow brim, the glace kid boots with 
 the patent-leather toes, a flower in his buttonhole, and a 
 cheap cigar between his lips. 
 
 Loo with swift insight summed him up at once. 
 
 "Going racing, Ted?" 
 
 He was bold and bluffing. 
 
 "That's it," he said. "Must make a little bit extry 
 sometimes. Get you a dress for the Derby." 
 
 He swaggered out. She followed him. He swung 
 round on her fiercely, defiantly. There was no resistance 
 in her face. He saw it and collapsed. 
 
 "Meg and me will be glad to see you home, Ted," she 
 said quietly. 
 
 The words, and her way of saying them, touched the 
 little cockney's heart. 
 
 A moment he hovered in the balance. 
 
 Then a man poked his head round the corner of the 
 street and whistled. 
 
 Teddy went to the lure. 
 
XV 
 
 THE WEAK SPOT 
 
 He came home drenched but not drunk, and in high 
 fettle : he had made his railway fare and half a quid. 
 
 "There you are!" he cried, and slammed the bit of gold 
 on to the table with a swagger. "That's a little bit of all 
 right, ain't it? Who's the worse for that?" 
 
 She took the money coldly. 
 
 "I hope you ain't got cold," she said. "That's all." 
 
 "Cold!" he scoffed. "Not me! I ain't made o' 
 butter." 
 
 Yet next day he complained of a pain in his side, and 
 came back at night with red-hot cheeks and burning eyes. 
 
 He went to bed early, and in the night tossed and 
 groaned. 
 
 Loo got up and lit a candle. 
 
 "What is it?" she asked, still resisting him. 
 
 "Like a stab in my heart each time I catch me breath," 
 he gasped. 
 
 There was no question of work in the morning. His 
 eyes were wild, his face flushed and contorted. It was 
 clear that he was in a high fever. 
 
 153 
 
154 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The Woodpecker with the hard bright eye and flaming 
 crest had found a weak spot and was busy with relentless 
 beak. 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
 Doctor English came and pronounced the trouble 
 pleurisy. 
 
 "You must go on your club," he said. 
 
 Teddy was too ill to be anything but docile. 
 
 Loo nursed and poulticed him. And in his weakness he 
 came back to her as a naughty child comes back to its 
 mother. The defiance and bitterness died out of him. 
 The old Teddy, loving and beloved, was born again in 
 tears and suffering. 
 
 To Loo, as to many another good woman, the days of 
 her husband's sickness were among the best of her life. 
 
 Safe in bed, her eye upon him, he could not get into 
 trouble. 
 
 The Spirit of Resistance folded its wings. 
 
 She was free to love him without the fear that in loving 
 him she was harming him. 
 
 "I know I ain't been much of late, oP gal," said the 
 repentant invalid. "It's worry done it. You and the 
 kid and all." 
 
 She stopped his mouth with kisses. 
 
 When Teddy was better Miss English came round and 
 played chess with him. That militant lady said nothing; 
 
THE WEAK SPOT 155 
 
 but sitting severe and solid at his bedside she gave him a 
 sound beating at a game at which it was his pleasure to 
 fancy himself invincible. 
 
 He took the beating in good part, and was quite quick 
 enough to understand the severity. 
 
 "I know it's my own fault, Miss," he said, as the other 
 folded up the board. "But it wasn't the drink." 
 
 The lady showed no mercy. 
 
 "It was worse," she said. 
 
 "I made a bit, though," he cried, twinkling defiantly. 
 
 "I'm sorry to hear it," replied the other; and added 
 cruelly that his illness would cost him far more than he 
 had made. 
 
 "Oh, no, Miss. I'm on me club all right," said Teddy, 
 determined not to give in. 
 
 "What's your club?" scoffed the remorseless lady. 
 "It's only a sick club. If you'd joined a proper Friendly 
 Society years ago, as I advised you, you'd be in a position 
 to boast now." 
 
 "And perhaps I will, Miss, when I'm up," said Teddy 
 sullenly. 
 
 "And I'm sure I hope you will," replied the other. "The 
 doctor's been very grieved about it all — very. He'd 
 thought you'd put that sort of thing behind you years 
 ago." 
 
 The shaft went home. The sparkle died out of the 
 little cockney's eyes; the battle out of his face. He 
 
156 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 lay back on his pillows, warm, wistful, somewhat 
 pitiful. 
 
 "I'm only a working-chap, Miss," he muttered. 
 
 Her victory won, the lady relented. She gave him her 
 hand. 
 
 "Cheer up!" she said. "The doctor says you're doing 
 capitally. He'll be round to see you later." 
 
 Doctor English came nearly every day — some- 
 times to see his patient, sometimes to chat with his 
 friend. 
 
 The little cockney, pale upon his pillow, and the great 
 brown-bearded doctor talked at length of the evils of this 
 present time and notably unemployment; its cause and 
 cure. 
 
 It was well-known in Mudsey that Doctor English was 
 a Socialist; and therefore it had caused some surprise and 
 many rumours when to Swiney's bitter indignation he 
 had opposed and been largely instrumental in defeating 
 the member of the S. D. P. who at a recent election had 
 contested the constituency. 
 
 Teddy wanted to know. 
 
 In the bottom of his heart he did not believe in the 
 Socialism of Swiney, because he saw that it was inspired 
 by envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. 
 
 In answer to Teddy's questions Doctor English denned 
 himself as a Fabian Collectivist. 
 
THE WEAK SPOT 157 
 
 "This is my sort of Socialism," he said, and handed 
 Teddy a pamphlet called "The Charter of the Poor." 
 
 The pamphlet lay on Teddy's bed unread. 
 
 A steam-roller was crushing him; and he was too much 
 occupied with the slow advancing wheels that ground the 
 life out of him to bother himself with the well-intentioned 
 person on the pavement who was shouting excellent advice 
 to the driver. 
 
 From his bed by craning he could see the street and the 
 heads of the men who trickled up and down it. Some of 
 them he recognized. He had seen them outside the gates 
 of the yard. They were Hacket's men on the way to and 
 from the works. 
 
 He would lie awake and hear them going by in the dark 
 every morning — on the way to fill his place; and saw 
 them drifting back singly or in groups till dusk. 
 
 The bright-eyed Woodpecker had his claws in the little 
 cockney's side and was peck-pecking. 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
 Doctor English with his seeing eyes noticed the look 
 on his patient's face when he came that afternoon. 
 
 "Side still bad?" he asked. 
 
 "No, sir. It's easing off nicely now, thank you." 
 
 The doctor said nothing. 
 
 "He doesn't look quite himself yet," he said to Loo in 
 the kitchen, as he departed. 
 
158 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "No, sir," said Loo, wide-eyed. "It's worry — about 
 his place." 
 
 "Ah," said the other. "I know." 
 
 Next morning he told his patient he could get up. 
 
 "It's a day earlier than he should," he said to Loo 
 downstairs. "But he may worry less if he's up. It's 
 a choice of evils." 
 
 Directly he was gone Teddy called his wife, and told 
 her to go round to the yard and tell the time-keeper he'd 
 be back on Monday. 
 
 She protested; and he snapped at her. 
 
 So she went. 
 
XVI 
 
 MR. EDWARD 
 
 In Halfpenny Alley outside Mapleton's archway- 
 Loo found a tail of dingy men with strained faces. They 
 made way for her, and she found herself at the porter's 
 box under the archway. 
 
 The time-keeper sat dumped on a stool within. 
 
 Loo gave her message. 
 
 "Edward Hankey. He's been in bed with pleurisy. 
 I was to say he'd be round on Monday." 
 
 The time-keeper, a heavy-breathing brute-man, looked 
 at the pale woman out of his great gross eyes and said 
 nothing. 
 
 "Will it be all right?" 
 
 "Can't say," callously. "How long's he been away?" 
 
 "Since Monday week." 
 
 The Ogre blinked. 
 
 "There's ten men for every place," he said, and his 
 voice came oozing out of him in thick drops. "I'll put 
 his name down." 
 
 "He's worked here fifteen years," said Loo. 
 
 "I know the name." 
 
 159 
 
160 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 She withdrew and walking up the yard stood in the 
 stench of the pits, a forlorn figure, shawl-bewrapped. 
 
 Two beam-men, heavily-clogged, leather-aproned, and 
 their legs bound about with matting, were lugging a slimy 
 white hide across the sloppy floor from the lime-pit, out 
 of which they had hauled it to lay it on a sopping pile of 
 other such hides beside their beams. 
 
 One of them recognized her; and, touched by something 
 desolate in the little woman's appearance, came to a halt 
 and called to her. 
 
 She told him her trouble. 
 
 He pointed to a long young man in a white coat picking 
 his way between the pits. 
 
 "There's Mr. Edward — the young guv'nor," he whis- 
 pered. "Try him. He's all right." 
 
 Mr. Edward was the master's son, a young man of 
 whom it was said in the works that he chucked the swank 
 a treat — by which was meant that he was consistently 
 courteous to his hands. 
 
 Loo went toward him with beating heart. 
 
 "Can I see you a minute, sir?" 
 
 He turned his grave, rather sad young face upon the 
 wisp of white woman blowing in the bleak wind before him. 
 He was under thirty and happily married; but he was dis- 
 appointed. A man of ideals, nourished in the halls of 
 College at Eton and the quadrangles of Christchurch, he 
 had wished to be a parson and sweat and suffer amid the 
 
MR. EDWARD 161 
 
 sweating, suffering millions in the slums. Then his father's 
 failing health had called him to the business. There he 
 had hoped to reconcile in his own works at least the con- 
 flicting demands of Capital and Labour. He had found 
 between master and man an abyss that could not be 
 bridged. The old spirit, feudal at its worst, fatherly and 
 affectionate at its best, was for ever dead. Capital and 
 Labour were massed together in opposite camps, and 
 always drawing farther off. 
 
 "Certainly," he said to the woman at his side. 
 
 Loo had never spoken before to a gentleman by birth, 
 tradition, and education. The repose of the man gave 
 her a strange confidence. 
 
 "It's my husband, sir. He's had pleurisy, and been 
 away a fortnight. He'll be back on Monday. Wanted 
 to know if his place would be kept." 
 
 "What name?" 
 
 "Hankey, sir." 
 
 "Hankey. Oh, I remember him. Leading hand on a 
 splitting-machine in shop 3, isn't he?" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Oh, that'll be all right, I expect," said the young man 
 kindly. "He's been with us for years." 
 
 Colour flooded the woman's face. 
 
 "Oh, thank you, sir," she trembled. 
 
 After luncheon Mr. Edward strolled into shop 3. 
 
162 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "What about a man called Hankey?" he asked the 
 foreman. 
 
 "Why, sir, he's a good man enough," said the foreman. 
 "Used to be a bit saucy and that; but he's steadied down 
 wonderful since he married." He dropped his voice. 
 "Only thing I got against 'Ankey myself is that he's a bit 
 too thick in with the Socialists." 
 
 "We must have 'em all sorts," said Mr. Edward, 
 a Socialist himself. "He's away sick, I understand. 
 Who've you got in his place?" 
 
 "A temporary hand, sir. He was a leading hand at 
 Hacket's." 
 
 "Is he any good?" 
 
 "Oh, yes, sir. He's a better man than Hankey for the 
 work. Hankey don't seem so good as he were. That's 
 'im — at the third machine. Beside Swiney." 
 
 Mr. Edward saw a gray-haired, thick-set man setting 
 a machine. 
 
 "He's got five children, sir; and steady as Time," con- 
 tinued the foreman. 
 
 "Has Hankey any children?' 
 
 "No, sir. Not as I ever heard of. An old soldier, too. 
 Through the war. He'll tell you all about it." 
 
 Mr. Edward, an officer in the Territorials, sauntered 
 slowly down the shop and marked with appreciative eye 
 the long trail of ribands across the old soldier's dingy 
 waistcoat. 
 
MR. EDWARD 163 
 
 "Been in the Army?" 
 
 The man stood up; a simple, honest-eyed, stubby- 
 haired fellow. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Those aren't all South African," pointing to the 
 ribands. 
 
 "No, sir. This one's Black Mountain Expedition. 
 These two are South Africa." 
 
 He spoke with the quiet, self-respecting deference of the 
 man who has been used to dealing with gentlemen, be- 
 lieves in them, trusts in them, has measured their worth 
 and his own. 
 
 Mr. Edward, his fine feeling for the nicer shades of 
 manner undimmed by his benevolent Socialism, noticed 
 it approvingly. 
 
 There were not a dozen men in the works who had that 
 pleasant old-world touch. He could talk to this man 
 exactly as the man talked to him — neither giving nor 
 receiving more than his just due. 
 
 "What regiment?" 
 
 "Royal Fusiliers."^ 
 
 Mr. Edward had had a cousin in the Royal Fusiliers — 
 killed at Paardeberg. 
 
 The man had known him, but had not been in his 
 company. 
 
 "How long have you been out of work?" 
 
 "Since Hacket's closed down, sir. This is the first 
 
164 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 reg'lar job like I've had for six months. We've come 
 down to two rooms — the six of us; and I've pawned 
 pretty nigh everything in them except the bed. Now I'm 
 just beginning to get my sticks out." He smiled somewhat 
 foolishly. "Took the baby's boots out of pawn yester- 
 day." 
 
 Mr. Edward sauntered away. 
 
 "I can't turn that man off," he said moodily to the fore- 
 man. "Hankey must wait for the next vacancy. Some- 
 thing's sure to fall in soon, I suppose." 
 
 "Sure to," said the foreman cheerily. "It'll only be 
 a matter of a day or two at most." 
 
 On the whole a just man, he had a faint prejudice againt 
 Teddy — a prejudice so faint that he himself was entirely 
 unaware of it. Its real origin lay in the fact that Teddy 
 was red-haired and blue-eyed; and the foreman, a dark 
 man, descended from a long line of black-haired ancestors, 
 felt a remote racial antipathy for a type that had been in 
 bygone centuries the blood-foe of him and his. 
 
 That evening Mr. Edward told his wife the little tale. 
 
 She was a young woman, smitten to the heart by the 
 compunction that the best of her class feel for the suffer- 
 ings of those on whom they live. 
 
 She heard her husband out. 
 
 "And what about Hankey? " she said, lifting her anxious 
 eyes to his. 
 
MR. EDWARD 165 
 
 "He may have to wait a bit, I suppose," said the young 
 man moodily, his weak and handsome face clouded. 
 
 "How long?" 
 
 The other shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "How can I say?" 
 
 There was a touch of irritation in his voice. 
 
 She persisted quietly. 
 
 "How long has he worked for you?" 
 
 The young man got up suddenly, knelt by the fire, and 
 poked it viciously. 
 
 "I don't know," he said. "All I do know is that one 
 man has five children, and the other has none." 
 
 She lifted grave eyes to his. 
 
 "I hope it's just," she said. 
 
XVII 
 THE LULL 
 
 Loo ran home, happy as a girl. 
 
 "It's all right," she called across the street to her neigh- 
 bour, Mrs. Baxter. "They're keeping his place for him." 
 
 "Good on 'em," cried the sympathetic young woman, 
 nursing her baby, and crossed to her. 
 
 They paused a minute to chat. 
 
 Some one tapped sharply at the window above. Loo 
 looked up to see a gleam of pale and anxious face above 
 her. 
 
 " Come in then ! " croaked an angry voice. " Come in.'' 
 
 "There's my chap!" she cried, and darted in. "I'm 
 comin', Ted." 
 
 He was standing at the head of the stairs, a dim ghost 
 in his nightshirt, awaiting her. 
 
 "Cant you come in and tell me then?" he scolded 
 harshly. "Need you stop clackin' with that woman in 
 the street? Ain't I the first as ought to know? " 
 
 "It's all right, Ted," she laughed. "They're keeping 
 it for you." 
 
 The strain on his heart relaxed. He softened at once. 
 
 166 
 
THE LULL 167 
 
 She tucked him up in bed again. He lay red-haired and 
 haggard amid his pillows. 
 
 "Whod'yousee?" 
 
 "Mr. Edward." 
 
 Teddy laughed. 
 
 "Like your cheek. What's he say?" 
 
 "'Oh,' he says, "Ankey' he says. 'Leading 'and in 
 shop 3, ain't he? That'll be all right' he says. 'He's been 
 with us a long time* I like him. Nice-spoken chap, ain't 
 he?" 
 
 "Don't know," said Teddy. "Never spoke to him, 
 though I've worked for him and his father going on twenty 
 year. Some of 'em say he's right enough." 
 
 Loo chattered away. 
 
 "'Andsome chap, I call him," she said. "And 
 talk so quiet too — like as if he'd all the time. 
 And ain't he a size? Six foot, I guess." In the 
 archery a six-foot man was unknown except in the 
 form of a policeman. "But that porter, he's a crusty 
 thing." 
 
 "Old Big Belly," mused Teddy. "Yes. 'E don't like 
 me. And so you 'ad it out with Mr. Edward. Like your 
 cheek." 
 
 He pulled her down upon the bed and caressed her. 
 The shadow had passed for the moment from their lives. 
 And in the fleeting joy of that spurious dawn they could 
 dare once more to be themselves. 
 
168 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 It was a March day, beautifully mild. The spring had 
 suddenly swooped down on the waiting city. All down 
 the Row windows were flung wide to welcome it, windows 
 tight-sealed against the winter mists and murk these six 
 months past. Here and there in the misty splendour 
 above the array of roofs something glittered like the spears 
 of a host advancing up the banks of the seaward-dashing 
 river. Rivulets of light and air rushed into dens noisome 
 with the accumulated smells of six prisoned months — 
 cleansing, healing, searching out; blowing about the red- 
 blotched faces of babies with swollen eyelids who laughed 
 at it and spread forth grimy arms as to a friend; ruffling 
 the rags of unspeakable beds; rushing down alleys in a 
 strong refreshing tide, calm and mild and beneficent. 
 
 Loo flung the window wide. The inrushing air fingered 
 tenderly her hair and lifted the red lock on her husband's 
 forehead as he lay back on his pillows. 
 
 Through the window came occasionally the noises of the 
 street — loud splashes in the silence. And behind, the 
 under-song of the city, broad-spread for leagues around, 
 rose like the boom of breakers on a far shore. And borne 
 bubble-wise on that far flood of sound rose another sound, 
 crisp, clear, uplifting. It was the purr and chirrup of a 
 lark, pouring its song in silvery streamlets into the 
 droughty heart of the huge town. 
 
 Teddy listened to it. 
 
 "He sings on," he mused. "Cage and all." 
 
THE LULL 169 
 
 Loo leaned out of the window. 
 
 "Plucky little moulder," she said. "I can't see noth- 
 ing. Only the top of his cage." 
 
 "Trying to lift the roof, I'll lay," said Teddy. "Only 
 he can't." 
 
 He lay back on his pillows, a mysterious beauty in his 
 face. His shirt was open, and his thin chest exposed as 
 though to lay bare his heart to the f ulfilling song. 
 
 And as the bird showered its silvery rain into that living 
 bowl it began to brim. Teddy's eyes filled and over- 
 flowed; his spirit uttered itself in sound. He hummed. 
 The bird sang on, tender and untiring, its soul rising to 
 heaven on tremulous wings, its body pinned to earth by 
 its environment. The hum of the harkening man rose in 
 reply. Words emerged and took to themselves wings. 
 Teddy sang. The bird had charmed the music from his 
 tired heart as the sun charms the blossom from the winter 
 black-thorn. 
 
 The door opened softly. Doctor English stood in it and 
 listened. 
 
 "You're better," he said at length as the other paused. 
 "You're a new man." 
 
 Teddy cleared his throat. The mist faded from his 
 eyes, the beauty from his face. 
 
 "Yes, sir," he said. "I'm going back to work on Mon- 
 day." 
 
 The doctor washed his hands. 
 
170 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "No," he said, shaking a wise head. 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "I wouldn't," the other said. "Pleurisy's a queer 
 thing. And one of those lungs of yours is none too strong 
 at the best of times." 
 
 "Must, sir," said Teddy. "Times is too tight." 
 
 "If you must you must," said the doctor quietly. 
 
 He tramped home in that mingled mood of joy and 
 sorrow, of boundless hope in the Future and ineffable 
 weariness with the Present, that grew on him always with 
 the years. 
 
 "Hankey'll be on the consumptive list next," he told 
 his sister that evening. "Waste, waste, waste! A stitch 
 in time — and nobody'U take it. And we call ourselves 
 a great nation." 
 
 Miss English looked up from her accounts. She held 
 it to be one of her first duties in life to check what she 
 called the sentimentality of her brother. To this end 
 the attitude she would adopt when with him was one of 
 extreme severity. 
 
 "I daresay," she said harshly. "If so it'll be his own 
 fault. If he hadn't gone racing he wouldn't have got 
 pleurisy." 
 
 "Quite so," retorted her brother. "If he hadn't been 
 human he might have been divine. 
 
XVIII 
 
 THE TWO MEN 
 
 On Monday at five Teddy rose without a struggle. 
 
 Weak though he was the effort of taking up life afresh 
 was little to him. 
 
 He was the man who does not feel the lash for joy of 
 thinking of the noose he has escaped. 
 
 Somehow he had flung off the Great Woodpecker. And 
 the hard-eyed bird skimmed away with a mocking chuckle 
 to settle in another tree, and there with keen beak set 
 about its unending business of criticism and searching out. 
 
 Meg still slept in her cot in the corner as he rose. 
 
 Teddy bent over her and kissed her. 
 
 ^She spread out her little sleepy arms and murmured, 
 "Daddy!" 
 
 "Yes, duckie. Daddy ain't done yet," he whispered 
 and went downstairs upon his toes. 
 
 Loo was already in the kitchen and had a cup of tea 
 ready for him. Then she muffled him up and came to the 
 street-door with him. 
 
 "Look after yourself, old man," she said. "And wrap 
 up warm when you come out." 
 
 171 
 
172 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The under- world was waking. Dark shadows hunted 
 down the street in the lamplight, some of them silent, some 
 swearing; here and there the silence shot with a hoarse 
 laugh or the sound of a woman's voice. 
 
 It was strangely desolate and forlorn, this process 
 of the waking of the monster city to the business of 
 another day. 
 
 Teddy plunged into the swirl of the dark stream that 
 bore him swiftly out of Loo's sight. 
 
 He had not been out for a fortnight; and the cold air 
 bathed his face and freshened him. 
 
 After his confinement to a tiny room, the feel of the 
 atmosphere, the dingy loving sky so close above him, the 
 slop and shuffle of feet, the stir and mutter of rousing 
 millions, moved him strangely. He walked with up- 
 lifted face, rejoicing in his new-found freedom. A sickle 
 moon hung over a high black roof, and as he trotted down 
 narrow Mudsey Wall he had a glimpse of the river sliding 
 snake-like by. 
 
 He paused and peeped through an archway at it. 
 
 It was his friend again to-day, his old friend. It spoke 
 to him, and he to it. Its gleam, its swirl, its swiftness 
 woke in him rumours and memories of what had been. 
 This was one of those strange moments in lif e when a whiff 
 of the Past, roused by some mystic touch from the buried 
 deeps of being, rises suddenly in the soul like the scent of a 
 familiar flower unseen but recognized at night. Dim faces 
 
THE TWO MEN 173 
 
 floated up in the water of his mind. He heard old voices, 
 recalled old scenes — himself in his father's arms on Lon- 
 don Bridge, the river streaked and streaming underneath, 
 the seagulls white-winged about his head, his own fat 
 white arm clutching at them, and his father's whiskered 
 and weathered cheek close to his own. Then he saw his 
 mother very clearly. She was smiling at him, the some- 
 what quizzical smile, tender and teasing, she kept for him 
 and him only. 
 
 A great tenderness stole over him as he turned down 
 Halfpenny Alley. It was in no evil mood that he found 
 himself in the familiar yard, amid the old smells, greeting 
 and greeted. 
 
 "What ho, Ted!" 
 
 "Cheer, Alf!" 
 
 "Was you at the football on Saturday?" 
 
 "No, I bin laid up." 
 
 "Ah, thought I hadn't seen you about." 
 
 He passed above the lime-pits white as milk in the half- 
 light and was one of the first to enter his familiar splitting- 
 shop. Early as he was, there was one earlier. 
 
 "Who's that?" cried Teddy cheerily. 
 
 The man looked up through spectacles, and Teddy saw 
 that he was a stranger. 
 
 It was as though some one had clutched and squeezed 
 his heart. 
 
 He walked toward the other. 
 
174 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The man was standing in his place, bending over his 
 machine; and the man was taking off his coat. 
 
 "'Ello, mate," Ted said quietly. 
 
 The other looked up over his spectacles; a sturdy bare-* 
 necked fellow with stubby gray hair and singularly honest 
 eyes. 
 
 " 'Ello," he said, somewhat unconciliatorily. 
 
 The two men stared at each other in the flare of the gas: 
 the gray man and the red. 
 
 Both were good men, sound men, true men; and each 
 had a wife, a home, a family. 
 
 "I thought this were my place," said Teddy, breathing 
 deep. 
 
 Each stood with an appropriating hand upon the 
 machine as though conscious that to lose touch was to 
 lose claim. 
 
 "I understood," said the gray man, mild and stubborn, 
 " as I'd got this job permanent." 
 
 "All I know is," said Teddy, very white, "I've worked 
 here for fifteen years." The other men were filing into 
 the shop. "Ain't I, Bert?" 
 
 "You've worked there alongside o' me ever since I been 
 here," said Swiney. "And that's eight year come June. 
 And now they're going to shunt you. That's it. A little 
 way they've got." 
 
 "The foreman told me o' Saturday," said the gray man 
 doggedly, " as I was to 'ave this job permanent from now." 
 
THE TWO MEN 175 
 
 "Funny thing," panted Teddy, his chest heaving. 
 "Where's the foreman?" 
 
 The foreman, who was always a little late on Monday 
 morning and always irritable after the religious debauch 
 of the previous day, came fussing into the shop in his long 
 white overall. 
 
 "'Ullo, 'Ankey,"he said harshly. "You're back on us, 
 are you?" 
 
 "Yes, sir," said Teddy. "And found this man in my 
 place." 
 
 "That's all right," said the foreman fussily. "We kep' 
 it open for you for a fortnight, but we couldn't keep it no 
 longer. You're to have the next vacancy. You may 'ave 
 to wait a day or two." 
 
 "Beg pardon," said Teddy firmly. "Mr. Edward 
 said " 
 
 " Outside, if you please," said the foreman. 
 
 "Mr. Edward said " 
 
 The foreman threw an authoritative finger toward the 
 door. 
 
 "Ah, you can 'ave that out with Mr. Edward. He'll 
 be here at ten o'clock. Come," he laid a hand upon the 
 other's shoulder. " We want to get on." 
 
 "Shall I get to work, sir?" said the gray man. 
 
 "Yes, certainly." 
 
 The gray man put on his apron. 
 
 Reluctantly Teddy's hand slipped from the machine. 
 
176 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 It was as though he was relaxing his hold on life and 
 knew it. 
 
 Slowly he turned his back, and passed shaking down the 
 shop. 
 
 A few yards off he turned and looked back. 
 
 The gray man at his machine lifted an almost appealing 
 eye to his. 
 
 All that was generous in Teddy's by no means unchival- 
 rous soul was touched. 
 
 "There! it ain't no fault o* your'n, old mate," he said in 
 strangely quiet voice. "I don't blame you." 
 
 He held out his hand. The other took it. 
 
 "I'm sure I'm very sorry," he said. "I got a wife and 
 children." 
 
 "Ah, you ain't the only one," answered Teddy, white 
 and quivering. "But 'tain't no fault o' your'n." 
 
 " 'Tain't no fault of his," muttered Swiney. "It's the 
 
 system. That's where it is. Trample each other 
 
 underfoot in the interests of the capitalists." 
 
 The foreman was coming toward them. 
 
 "Too much talkin' down there," he said. "Come, 
 'Ankey ! outside, h'if you please." 
 
XIX 
 
 OUTSIDE 
 
 Teddy found himself in the yard amid the waste and 
 offal of a great industry on a desolate morning of March. 
 
 It was still dark, but eastward through a break in the 
 surrounding walls there was a gleam in the dingy sky be- 
 hind black chimneys and huddled roofs. 
 
 The sun was rising once again on the city gathered in 
 gloom beside the river that ran like a shining spear through 
 the heart of it. 
 
 Teddy leaned against the wall and sweated. 
 
 He stood in an abyss, hemmed in by high walls lit 
 by windows behind which were the workers, warm and 
 busy. 
 
 And he was outside. 
 
 There was a stir and movement all about him; men com- 
 ing, going, talking cheerily, so cheerily. 
 
 They didn't care. What was it to them? 
 
 Overhead there was a narrow riband of sky, dingy and 
 very remote. 
 
 The abyss in which Teddy stood was called the yard. 
 In fact it was little more than a narrow way down which 
 
 177 
 
178 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 a line of rails ran to Mudsey Wall. At the other end was 
 the gloomy archway opening on Halfpenny Alley. 
 
 In the archway hung a great lantern; and in the light of 
 it he could see the dim faces of the unemployed peering 
 hungrily through the gates. 
 
 The fat porter was busy with a brush and pail outside 
 his little wooden hut. He was the only man to be seen 
 and Teddy went toward him. 
 
 "Beg pardon, Mr. Sugar," he said. "I understood I 
 was to 'ave my place on Monday." 
 
 The fat porter did not look up. He sluiced about with 
 his brush, and sent a swift lake swirling under Teddy's 
 feet. Teddy felt it through his thin boots and skipped. 
 Some of the men peering through the gates giggled; and 
 the fat porter looked demure. 
 
 "What name?" he said. 
 
 "Well, I thought you might ha' know'd my name a'ter 
 all these years," said Teddy. 
 
 "What name?" snarled the porter; and again the men 
 outside the gate giggled. 
 
 "'Ankey," said Teddy, quivering. 
 
 The other rounded on him. 
 
 "Well, why couldn't you say so afore instead o' keepin' 
 me muckin' about? Ain't you got a tongue in that 
 bloody red 'ead o' your'n?" 
 
 Teddy's eyes flared in the dusk; but he said nothing. 
 
 Leisurely the fat porter retired to his box; leisurely he 
 
OUTSIDE 179 
 
 hung his hat upon a peg; and leisurely he lit a gas-stove. 
 Then he turned to a ledger. 
 
 "Le's see. What name?" 
 
 Teddy was hammered white-hot now. 
 
 '"Ankey," quiet and quivering. 
 
 " 'Ankey. Yes. Le's see. There's a man got your 
 job." He pursed his fat lips, and looked official. 
 "You're to 'ave first vacancy." He took off his pince- 
 nez and slammed the ledger. "And lucky to get it." 
 
 "I understood," said Teddy firmly, "as I was to 'ave 
 my job o' Monday morning." 
 
 The fat porter was nothing if he was not a bully. His 
 own job was something of a sinecure and he held it against 
 all comers. 
 
 He rolled off his stool, and came out of his box on to the 
 pavement. 
 
 "Look 'ere, you 'Ankey!" he called in loud, harsh voice. 
 " I've 'ad enough o' you. I'm puttin' you over the heads 
 of all these pore chaps what have been waitin' out here 
 for months past. And yet you grouse. If it ain't good 
 enough say so, and I'll strike your name off the books. 
 There's lots o' chaps 'ere glad to take the chance I'm 
 offerin' you." 
 
 The fat man had the crowd outside the gate with him, 
 and he knew it. They mumbled applause. As Teddy 
 disappeared through the ranks of them one or two 
 jeered. 
 
180 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Loo was giving Meg her breakfast as he entered. She 
 looked up at him, startled. 
 
 "Hullo, Ted! Ain't you well then?" 
 
 "I'm right enough," he said, white and whistling. 
 
 "What then?" 
 
 "Turn me off. 'Ello, Meg? Daddy's out o' work. 
 What ye think o' that now?" 
 
 He seemed to have swallowed a sword. And the sword 
 laughed and whistled and rattled in its scabbard as a 
 sword might before it sought ease and silence in a heart. 
 
 "There must be a mistake," urged Loo. 
 
 "There's no mistake," said Teddy, cheerful as a flame. 
 "I'm gettin' on. I'm over thirty. They want some one 
 younger. Here, Meg! Catch!" 
 
 There was a knock at the door. Loo went. It was 
 the young man from the Mudsey Artisans' Dwellings 
 Company come for the rent. 
 
 " That's it," laughed Teddy. " Let 'em all come ! " 
 
 Loo soothed him like a child; but it was long before she 
 could get his story from him. 
 
 "It's Big Belly," he gulped. "Treat me like a dog. 
 Guyin' me afore 'em all. If I'd 'ad a knife — that's all." 
 
 He was moved to his deeps. 
 
 The mother put the child upon his knee. Uncaressed, 
 she slipped to the ground again. 
 
 "There's a mistake," urged Loo. "You must go round 
 and see Mr, Edward, There's no one there when the 
 
OUTSIDE 181 
 
 works open — only foremen and such trash. They don't 
 know." 
 
 "I don't mind if I was never to set eyes on the 
 place again," answered Teddy. "Work you like a 
 slave and then scrap you first chance. I wouldn't treat 
 a dog so." 
 
 "There!" said Loo. "There! Mr. Edward's all right. 
 He's different. A gentleman." 
 
 "He's the same as the rest of 'em," said Teddy. "'E 
 don't care only so long as 'e can bleed the life out o' you 
 and add to his pile. Swiney's right. What's it matter to 
 the masters? There's ten chaps for every place. I've 
 worked there fifteen year; but that don't matter. He's 
 made his thousands out o' me. What's he care? You're 
 sick for a week, and they chuck you." 
 
 Later in the day she got him to go round to the yard. 
 
 He called at Mr. Edward's office. 
 
 Could he see Mr. Edward? 
 
 It was an unusual request coming from a workingman, 
 and the clerk looked up with amused eyes. 
 
 "No. I'm afraid you can't see Mr. Edward. What's 
 the trouble?" 
 
 Teddy explained. 
 
 The clerk with the amused eyes referred him to the 
 manager. 
 
 Teddy crossed to the manager's office. 
 
 Might he see the manager? 
 
182 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Another clerk, this one fussy and irritable, dealt with 
 him. What was it? What was it? What was it? 
 
 Teddy said that he had been referred to the manager by 
 the clerk at Mr. Edward's office, and stated his case. 
 
 It had nothing to do with the manager. The manager 
 couldn't attend to the complaints of individual working- 
 men. If Hankey had worked here for fifteen years, as he 
 said, he should have known that by now. He must go to 
 the clerk of the works, who saw to all those matters. 
 
 Teddy went — muttering. 
 
 The clerk of the works assured him that these things 
 didn't come within his province, and referred him to his 
 foreman. 
 
 The foreman came to the door of the shop and pointed 
 to the porter in the yard. 
 
 "There's the man you should go to," he said. 
 
 "Tm!" laughed Teddy. 
 
 He wandered about the narrow yard amid familiar 
 smells in a drizzling rain, his coat collar turned up about 
 his thin neck, watching other men at work. At a window 
 he could see the amused clerk staring at him. 
 
 He was being baited. 
 
 Under the archway stood the fat porter. He had come 
 out of his box and was talking to the crowd outside 
 through the bars of the gate. Then he pointed at Teddy; 
 and they laughed. 
 
OUTSIDE 183 
 
 Teddy stood still and stared, breathing through his 
 nose. 
 
 His back was up now, and his old resolution had 
 returned to him : he would wait for Mr. Edward if he had 
 to wait all day. 
 
 He lolled against the wall. Three went; four went; 
 five. 
 
 At 6.30 the men streamed out of the shops. 
 
 The door of Mr. Edward's office opened and the clerk 
 came out. Teddy stood up, expectant. The clerk locked 
 the door behind him. 
 
 Teddy crossed to him. 
 
 "Isn't Mr. Edward in there?" he asked. 
 
 "No. He's abroad," said the clerk with the amused 
 eyes. 
 
 Teddy flashed out on him. 
 • "And couldn't you have told me that afore?" 
 
 As he joined the stream of outgoing workers, he was 
 seething. 
 
 "That's manners, that is," he said. "Keep you waitin' 
 all day in the rain to see the young guv'nor, and then tell 
 you he's abroad." 
 
 Some of them had heard his story, and clustered about 
 him, asking questions. 
 
 "Tell 'em how long you've worked here, Ted," said 
 Swiney, who never missed a chance. 
 
 "Fifteen year!" muttered Teddy. 
 
184 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "There you are!" cried Swiney. "That's them. 
 Sweat the soul out o' you for fifteen year and then chuck 
 you first chance. It's the same with the workers and the 
 wornout 'orses. Only they can't send us to Belgium to 
 make cats' meat of us — not yet. Perhaps that'll come 
 in God's good time. And they say old Mapleton's a 
 churchwarden in his country place." 
 
 The fat porter stood at the gate as the workers flowed 
 past him. 
 
 "If you'll look round every morning, 'Ankey," he said 
 with caressing insolence, "perhaps I'll 'ave a job for you 
 one day." 
 
 Teddy came to a dead halt and flared white. 
 
 "None o' your patronage, Mr. Big Belly," he 
 
 panted with starting eyes; and passed out amid muffled 
 laughter. 
 
XX 
 
 IN THERE 
 
 Loo could not induce Teddy to go round to the yard 
 ext morning. 
 
 "Go round to be insulted by him!" he jeered. "Not 
 me. Go yourself if you want." 
 
 So she went and peeped into the porter's box. 
 
 The Ogre sat dumped within. 
 
 "Anything for my chap — 'Ankey?" she asked. 
 
 "Where's your 'usband?" growled the fat porter. 
 
 "He's trying for a bit of work at the waterside," said 
 Loo. 
 
 "He must come round himself," said the fat porter, 
 compressing lips of blubber. 
 
 "It goes against the grain with a man," said Loo. 
 
 "He must come himself," repeated the fat porter 
 masterfully. "You've twice the pluck o' him." 
 
 Loo flashed. 
 
 "You wouldn't say that to his face ! " she cried. 
 
 "Just send him around and see," replied the porter 
 grimly. 
 
 She returned home to find Teddy out. He had gone 
 
 185 
 
186 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 round to inspect the place where Jas. Allen had committed 
 suicide. 
 
 The tragedy had taken place in Paradise Court, one of 
 a solid phalanx of slums through the archway at the 
 back of Archery Row. The houses here were two-roomed, 
 and stood back to back. No street fed them. To reach 
 them you passed down a narrow way between blank walls, 
 skirted a disused tannery, and came upon a regiment of 
 alleys, rank on rank, huddled away, it seemed, out of sight 
 of God and Man; blind all of them, paved, and so narrow 
 that a big man walking with wide arms could almost 
 touch the walls on either side. 
 
 Standing back from the street, they were strangely 
 quiet, these tombs that prisoned living souls. There was 
 little sunlight except from the eyes of the rascal boys and 
 girls who sprawled about the pavements, gambled with 
 buttons, lay together in groups like puppies, a huddle of 
 limbs and laughing faces, the boys nursing the babies as 
 often as the girls, a welter of life, radiant in rags, abrim 
 with joy that no environment however miserable could 
 quench. 
 
 This solid phalanx of slums crouched away forgotten at 
 the back of high surrounding houses, like a flock of dingy 
 shepherdless sheep beneath a wall. Many people had 
 lived in Mudsey for years without knowing of its existence; 
 so unobtrusive was it. Others who had known preferred 
 
IN THERE 187 
 
 to forget. Yet here and in like haunts dwelt a large half 
 of Mudsey's inhabitants. 
 
 They were within a hand's throw of Archery Row but 
 miles removed from it socially. Teddy always spoke of 
 this plague patch at his back door as through the arch- 
 way. And through the archway was the road to the 
 Abyss. Men had disappeared from Archery Row through 
 it on the way to the dark and desolate waters in which 
 they went down for ever. Such an one was Jas. Allen, the 
 scene of whose suicide Teddy now sought. 
 
 It was seldom that Teddy penetrated to this under- 
 world. When he did so he was shy and suspicious. 
 Somehow he felt himself an intruder; and the fierce 
 young women in the doors with the gaudy beads about 
 the necks and the tattooed arms made him nervous. 
 Therefore he walked stealthily and with downward eyes. 
 Moreover, a fear of meeting Miss English, who was al- 
 ways in and out of these alleys on her Martha business, 
 possessed him; and he had a He ready for her should she 
 pounce upon him — that solid woman with her critical 
 eye summing him up through gold-rimmed pince-nez. 
 
 Teddy had no difficulty in finding the house he sought. 
 
 Ten minutes later he came out thoughtfully. 
 The present tenant followed him, talking still. 
 "I suppose *e was all out. Couldn't see nothing for it 
 only in there. He was getting on, ye see. Over fifty. 
 
188 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 There's not much doing for chaps that age hereabouts 
 now." 
 
 Teddy stared at his feet. 
 
 "And what come to 'is wife and kids?" 
 
 "Children's gone in there." The man jerked a thumb 
 across his shoulder. " She's in the asylum." 
 
 Teddy walked away, his red head down, and eyes on his 
 feet. Once through the archway he did not turn home- 
 ward but walked down hard, unsympathetic streets, unsee- 
 ing and unseen, till he came to the Workhouse. 
 
 There he paused. 
 
 Once he too had been in there. Nobody in the world 
 now knew it — not Loo, not even Doctor English. If 
 there was any evidence of it on earth it was in some for- 
 gotten ledger of thirty years ago. But if the world had 
 forgotten it, he had not. The experience had been 
 branded upon his child-soul. 
 
 It was after his mother's removal that they had taken 
 him in there. 
 
 He had been put in a big bare room with other children. 
 And the horror of it was that they were not like children — 
 not at least like the children he knew, the sunlight in their 
 eyes, and the laughter in their limbs. They were like 
 dolls; and like dolls they sat mechanically in rows against 
 the wall all dressed alike. Some of them, moreover, were 
 maimed — an eye shot here, a broken nose, an old scar; 
 and some of them were mangy, with great bald patches 
 
IN THERE 189 
 
 on their skulls, or plaster crosses. Imaginative Teddy 
 almost expected to see the sawdust tumbling out of them 
 or a detached china-leg lying on the floor. They all 
 dribbled at the nose; and they never smiled or talked. It 
 was not that they were forbidden to; it was that they had 
 no wish to. They sat against the wall, piteously patient, 
 tragically good. One little girl had a doll. She clutched 
 it by the body and banged its head with dull regularity 
 against the floor. At one end of the room a great fire 
 leaped and laughed grimly in an iron cage, its flames 
 escaping up the long dark chimney to heaven beyond. In 
 a corner were some cots with babies lying on their backs 
 staring all day long at the ceiling. Nobody nursed them. 
 Nobody cooed to them, coaxed them, chirruped to them, 
 made them gurgle, and brought the love-light to their 
 eyes. The difference between the babies and the children 
 was that the children sat against the walls, the babies 
 lay upon their backs. The children in the main were 
 silent except for sniffling — their six or seven years 
 of life had taught them to endure; the babies whimp- 
 ered now and then — they had not learnt their lesson 
 as yet. 
 
 Teddy remembered all that well — the homelessness, 
 the desolation, the lack of love, the absence of all sense of 
 the individual as a living and a precious soul. But most 
 of all he remembered a ramshackle ghoul-girl who haunted 
 the room. The sight of her had made him scream then — 
 
190 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 so that they smacked him; and the memory of her made 
 him sick still. She could not have been more than eigh- 
 teen or so; but she had a long gray face, old, hollow, and 
 sharp-featured, and black hair that hung in a lank and 
 stringy mat down to her neck. 
 
 She wore a gray print dress, and on her head was a 
 cap perched awry. Her right hand was like a shrivelled 
 claw and hung down from the wrist; and she floppped 
 about the room like a winged bird. Her forehead was 
 confined and sloped back suddenly; her head was high- 
 peaked, almost conical; and her eyes close-set and dreadful 
 behind a tallowy nose. She could not speak, but she 
 made disgusting noises. 
 
 Beside her there was a jolly buxom lass of sixteen or so 
 fatter than any girl of that age Teddy had ever seen — 
 and crosser. Her size seemed to amuse the ghoul-girl, 
 who made dabs at her with her claw and croaked, a cruel 
 lewd light glittering in her eyes. The fat girl would repel 
 the other's advances sullenly and with smacks. 
 
 Every now and then a pale, desiccated woman in a uni- 
 form, whom the fat girl called Nurse, looked in. And 
 once she stayed for a long time and rolled bandages. 
 While she was there the ghoul-girl no longer croaked and 
 teased her mate, and the fat girl made a great show of 
 bustling around and wiping noses — to relax again directly 
 the desiccated woman's back was turned. 
 
 Nobody was brutal; and nobdy cared. There was 
 
IN THERE 191 
 
 not very much obvious neglect — only the slow, insidious 
 cruelty of carelessness. But Teddy ceased to be himself. 
 His child-soul died unconsciously within him. He was no 
 longer little Teddy Boniface with a personality to be 
 encouraged: he was part of a machine and must fit into 
 his place. It had lasted some hundred unforgettable 
 hours, this slow absorption of an individual by his environ- 
 ment. Then he had been taken away in a cab to the 
 station. From there he had gone by a funny dark railway 
 a long, long way; and after that there was an interminable 
 'bus ride. Finally he was dropped at his aunt's; and he 
 didn't know that he had been taken a circuit of twenty 
 miles and at the end landed within a thousand yards of his 
 starting-point. There was an immense amount of secrecy 
 about his journey. In the course of it he was handed over 
 to the keeping of four several women, who passed him from 
 hand to hand, some with winks, some with self-consciously 
 close-clenched lips. 
 
 And the first thing his aunt had impressed upon him 
 with bony forefinger was that he was never, never to tell 
 ariy living soul that he had been in there. 
 
 He didn't wish to tell. All he wished to do was to for- 
 get. Moreover, he could not tell, even had he wished to : 
 for he had no notion where it was that he had been. And 
 it was not till he was well on in his teens that a chance 
 reading of a paper revealed to him that once he had been a 
 Workhouse child. 
 
192 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 It was with a strange and brooding sense of dread that 
 he now peered through the Union gates. 
 
 Whether it was this Workhouse of which he had once 
 been an inmate or another he did not know. But there 
 was a dreadful familiarity about its desolation, its home- 
 less, mechanical air, that brought the shuddering memories 
 back to his mind. 
 
 And now as he peered through the Workhouse gate the 
 sea-green mists issued from his soul and crept into his 
 blood, discolouring his face. 
 
 As he turned away he came across a little school of 
 children, all dressed alike in long red capes and blue bon- 
 nets, shuffling along two by two, and hand in hand. 
 There were no smiles on their faces or joy in their walk. 
 They were not naughty; they did not chatter; they did 
 not hop in and out of the gutter with brisk delight. They 
 kept to the pavement — a little army of mechanical men 
 and women clattering along in hob-nailed boots. Behind 
 them was an old spinal carriage in which were perched a 
 crowd of babies. Two old women in black bonnets pushed 
 it wearily along. 
 
 Teddy watched the mournful little procession 
 drift by. 
 
 "Them the Workhouse children?" he asked one of the 
 old women. 
 
 Glad of the excuse, she paused. 
 
 "Yes," she said. "These are the not- wanteds." The 
 
IN THERE 193 
 
 children grouped about her stared up at her with indif- 
 ferent eyes. 
 
 A wave of green swept across Teddy's face. 
 
 "Which are Allen's?" he asked. 
 
 "Them two." She pointed. "We allows 'em together 
 when they're brother and sister. Keeps 'em more quieter 
 like." 
 
 Teddy walked home. 
 
 "Well, old man, where you been?" asked Loo, as he 
 entered. 
 
 He sat down quietly before the fire. 
 
 "I been round looking at the not-wanteds," he said. 
 
 She looked up at him. 
 
 "And who are they?" 
 
 "They're the same as me." 
 
 When Meg came in that evening he took her in his arms 
 and nursed her covetously. Her head was on his shoul- 
 der; his thin-shirted arms wound about her. 
 
 She played with his moustache. 
 
 " 'Aven't you been to work, daddy? 
 
 "No, duckie." 
 
 "Where you been?" 
 
 He said after a pause — 
 
 "I been round to the Workhouse." 
 
 Meg, cozy in her daddy's arms, laughed. 
 
 "What's the Workhouse, daddy?" 
 
194 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 It was some time before he answered, 
 
 "It's the scrap-heap. . . . It's where they chuck you, 
 duckie, when they've squeezed all they can out of you." 
 
 "Take Meg there." 
 
 Teddy said nothing, but his arms tightened about his 
 child. 
 
 Next morning he made no difficulty about going to the 
 yard. 
 
 "Anything for me, Mr. Sugar?" he asked the porter 
 quietly. 
 
 The Ogre sat and blinked within with pursed lips. 
 
 "Yes," he said. "This here," and handed him an 
 envelope. 
 
 The envelope contained a printed slip directing his 
 attention to the enclosed, which ran: 
 
 Swearing on the premises strictly prohibited. Any employe offending 
 in this matter will be liable to suspension, or if the offence be repeated to 
 instant dismissal. 
 
 "I 'ave to warn you," said the fat porter officially, 
 "that any repetition of this offence will cause your dis- 
 missal." 
 
 Teddy trembled. 
 
 "And I suppose you never passed no remark about my 
 bloody red 'ead," he said. 
 
 "Never," replied the fat porter magnificently. "Move 
 on." 
 
 He rolled off his stool and out into the archway. 
 
XXI 
 MISS ENGLISH TO THE RESCUE 
 
 Miss English marched down Halfpenny Alley, her 
 colours flying; and her hat that was like a helmet added to 
 her militant air. 
 
 In a room in Pleasant Place she had found a shoal of 
 children untended by their slattern mother. It was her 
 opportunity long sought. With deft fingers she stripped 
 a child and found its body in the condition she had ex- 
 pected. The missing mother had reentered to find her 
 brat naked save for a stocking. The two women, enemies 
 of old, had battled shrilly; Miss English, a resolute fighter, 
 rejoicing in the struggle. Flashing still, she was now on 
 her way to fetch the school-nurse to take the children off to 
 the cleansing station. 
 
 Just past Mapleton's archway a man ran by her 
 swiftly. 
 
 He did not see her, did not salute her. 
 
 Happily the shrewd-eyed woman recognized him as he 
 hunted by with that stark- white look upon his face.'* 
 
 "Teddy!" she called after him. 
 
 He stopped and came back to her. 
 
 195 
 
196 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "I didn't see it was you, Miss," he panted, touching 
 his forehead. 
 
 The two had never been sympathetic. She could not 
 understand his nature as did her brother; nor he her ster- 
 ling qualities, her sound, practical capacity. She was too 
 critical for him. Yet he respected her; and he had good 
 cause. 
 
 That solid woman, if she was a severe critic, was a good 
 friend especially in adversity. The poor of Mudsey did 
 not love her, as many of them loved her brother; but they 
 came to her when they were in trouble. Doctor English 
 had once said of his sister in his laughing way that if her 
 heart was not soft it was sound, adding that it was not 
 soft perhaps because it was sound. 
 
 Her shrewd eyes somewhat blurred behind her high- 
 perched pince-nez now took Teddy in with kind compre- 
 hension. 
 
 The little cockney stood before her white about the 
 nostrils and breathing hard. 
 
 "What! haven't they taken you on again, Teddy?" she 
 asked, amazed. 
 
 "No, Miss." 
 
 She took some time to wring his story from him. 
 
 "But there must be some mistake," she cried. "It's 
 unjust. Why, you've worked there ever since I've known 
 you." 
 
 "That don't make no odds to them, Miss," said Teddy 
 
MISS ENGLISH TO THE RESCUE 197 
 
 quietly. "Only so long as there's chaps to do the work 
 for 'em. The more you study the masters, the less they 
 study you. That's how it is nowadays." 
 
 "But the Mapletons!" cried Miss English. 
 
 "They're the same as the rest, Miss," said Teddy. 
 "All for theirselves. "Don't care about us." 
 
 Miss English ignored him. 
 
 "I'll go round and see Mr. Edward myself," she said. 
 
 "He's abroad, Miss." 
 
 "Then I'll see the manager — at once." 
 
 She marched off resolutely down the alley, her short 
 brown skirts swinging, her well-shod feet treading firmly. 
 This was her work in life — to adjust here, to oil there, to 
 keep the old machine running as smoothly as might be. 
 Her brother's dreams of a new and improved machine, or 
 of the old machine running on new lines till it ran out of 
 memory of its former self, were not for her. It was hers 
 to deal with the day and the evil thereof; and she dealt 
 with it admirably. 
 
 As Teddy turned out of the alley he looked back. 
 
 Miss English was having words with the fat porter in 
 the archway. For the first time for weeks Teddy laughed. 
 He was chuckling still as he entered his house. 
 
 Loo met him with sympathetic smiles. 
 
 She had not seen that old twinkling look in Teddy's 
 eyes for days. 
 
 "What is it, dad?" she asked. 
 
198 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Teddy jerked over his shoulder. 
 
 "'Er," he said. 
 
 In that home and many others in Mudsey the feminine 
 pronoun stood always for Miss English. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Big Belly," chuckled Teddy. "Give him pepper, I'll 
 lay." 
 
 An hour later Miss English turned up. She was angry 
 with the world, angry with the manager, angry with Mr. 
 Edward — but victorious. 
 
 The manager would see Teddy at ten next morning. 
 
 "They try to shift the responsibility from one man to 
 the other," she panted, patting her hair. "But I cor- 
 nered 'em at last. 
 
 Teddy grinned in sympathy. He had been through 
 that trouble himself. 
 
 Next morning he went. 
 
 The fat porter was either cowed or conciliated. 
 
 "Better news to-day," he said. "The manager '11 
 see you at ten." 
 
 "I know that," answered Teddy curtly and passed on. 
 
 The manager was a portly person who breathed short 
 and walked tenderly on his feet. 
 
 "Well, you've had bad luck, Hankey," he said. "It's a 
 hard case, certainly." 
 
 "I ain't the only one," said Teddy sturdily. 
 
MISS ENGLISH TO THE RESCUE 199 
 
 The manager turned over a ledger. 
 
 "There isn't a vacancy as yet in a splitting-shop," he 
 said. "I've been looking to see if I can find you a job to 
 tide you over a bad spell. I'm afraid I've nothing very 
 tempting to offer. The only work I can find you is a 
 drawing job in the pits." 
 
 He looked up warily. 
 
 "No, sir," said Teddy and clenched his lips. 
 
 His strength lay in his hands and not in his body. He 
 was a skilled mechanic, not a navvy. Moreover, to 
 become a labourer was a social drop. He would lose 
 caste; his mates would chaff him. Again he was sus- 
 picious. Once they got him on a lower level, might they 
 not keep him there? Swiney was in his blood — Swiney 
 the Cynic, who believed in nobody and least of all em- 
 ployers. 
 
 "Well, you know your own interests best, my lad," said 
 the portly manager, and opened the door. "A job may 
 fall in for you to-morrow, or you may have to wait a 
 month. If you've got enough laid by to carry you over a 
 bad spell, I'm not sure you're not right." 
 
 Teddy marched out with a sparkle in his eyes. 
 
 "Good-day, sir," he said. "I've worked here for 
 fifteen year. And Mr. Edward said my place should be 
 kept." 
 
 The manager stood in the crack of the door. 
 
 "Did he promise you?" 
 
200 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "He promised my wife, sir." 
 
 The manager turned to his office, shaking his head. 
 
 "There's been some muddle over this," he said to the 
 head-clerk. "Says he's worked here fifteen years." 
 
 "So he has, sir," replied that functionary. 
 
 The manager shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "Then how on earth does Mr. Edward come to give his 
 place away?" 
 
 The head-clerk shook his shrewd gray head and dropped 
 his voice. 
 
 "Mr. Edward's this new sort o' young man," he said 
 confidentially. "Soft. He'll give away a job he's got 
 no manner o' business to give away just to save himself 
 the sight of suffering. Only makes more misery in the 
 end, I say." 
 
 "Well," said the manager, "we must hope a job '11 
 fall in soon." 
 
 And in fact Teddy got his place within the week. 
 
 He had been out of work just eight days. 
 
 It was not long; but it was long enough for him to learn 
 his lesson. 
 
 And the lesson he had learnt was the lesson that the 
 workers all over the world are learning — that once the 
 Giant Wheel spins you off into Space, it is mighty hard 
 to get back on to the rim. 
 
PART II 
 SQUEEZED 
 
1 am a man 
 More sinned against than sinnina. — Shakespeare. 
 
XXII 
 THE PLANK 
 
 Somewhat late in the day Teddy Hankey began to 
 save. 
 
 "Best lay by against a rainy day," he said. "There's 
 Meg." 
 
 "I'm for it," answered Loo brightly. 
 
 And thereafter save! was the word in 23 Archery Row. 
 
 The two set to work together manfully to put a plank 
 between themselves and the Abyss into which they saw 
 men and women on all sides of them tumbling. 
 
 There were no more new clothes for Teddy. He put 
 youth and swagger behind him for ever as he wrestled with 
 the grim and naked facts of life. Now he cobbled Meg's 
 shoes, his own boots, and his wife's. A few little personal 
 adornments of his romantic days he pawned. 
 
 "Where's your pin then?" asked Loo. 
 
 Teddy jerked significantly over his shoulder. Then 
 both smiled. 
 
 And Loo was as earnest as Teddy and even more so in 
 her desire to build a little ark in which Meg might float 
 secure upon the flood. She turned and returned her 
 
 203 
 
204 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 skirts. She pawned her brooch and several little trinkets 
 — her only ornament now the locket with photograph of 
 her child on one side of it and of her husband on the other. 
 
 There began to be a certain noble shabbiness about them 
 both. Neighbours in the Archery noticed it and nodded. 
 
 The Hankeys were going down. Acquaintances drew 
 away from them; friends in their own class they had none. 
 
 Of the three in 23 Archery Row, Meg was the only one 
 who was still bright as a new pin. 
 
 "She shan't go short whatever comes," said Teddy. 
 
 And indeed the child lacked for nothing. She was 
 round and fat as a baby rabbit, snuggling cozily away in 
 her sheepskin fur-coat. 
 
 The Governess from the school came round to see her 
 in her home, after she had received a prize for regular 
 attendance. 
 
 "It's a pleasure to see her," she said to smiling Loo. 
 " I wish they were all like that." 
 
 "We've only the one, you see," answered the happy 
 mother. "That makes a difference." 
 
 The Governess met Miss English farther down the 
 street. 
 
 "And the home!" she said. "It's so clean." 
 
 "Yes; it's not what it was," replied the other gravely. 
 "They're pinching and paring — to make up lost time." 
 
 Now that Meg was at school Loo proposed to make her 
 
THE PLANK 205 
 
 leisure profitable and to that end sought work of her old 
 employers, the corset-embroiderers. She found things 
 were not flourishing with them. They now employed seven 
 hands where in her day they had employed seventeen. 
 Machinery was supplanting hand-labour. All the fore- 
 woman could promise was that she would remember her. 
 Then Loo thought of taking in a lodger. But Teddy's old 
 fastidiousness reasserted itself. A lodger meant for him 
 the break-up of his home and the intrusion of a foreign 
 element. 
 
 "We ain't come to that yet," he said with a touch of 
 asperity. 
 
 Besides a lodger stood for outlay — the buying of a 
 bed and bedroom furniture. . . . And the word was 
 still save! save! save! 
 
 And they saved. Little by little, a shilling or two a 
 week, they put by. Teddy would not trust his money out 
 of sight in a bank or building society. Nor would he put 
 it in a desk, which would be the first thing a burglar would 
 break into. So a little hoard gathered beneath the tea in 
 the old teapot with the broken spout at the back of the 
 cupboard. The silver became gold, and the gold accumu- 
 lated. 
 
 "Quite the capitalist!" laughed Loo. "I wonder what 
 Mr. Swiney'd say." 
 
 Teddy said little. The bitter stage had passed; and 
 he seemed to have settled down. The iron had entered 
 
206 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 into his soul. But the strain was telling on him. If he 
 had ceased to be defiant, he began to have the eyes of a 
 hunted animal; and he was growing haggard as a winter 
 tree. It may be that he was suffering too deeply now to 
 utter his pain; it may be that Swiney was no longer at his 
 side to pour embittered poison into his ear. For he was 
 working now on another splitting-machine among new 
 faces. It was like going back to school afresh; and he 
 didn't like it; and his cough grew worse. On the old 
 machine the men alongside of whom he had worked for 
 years had grown used to it and him. It was not so with 
 his new mates. 
 
 "Spitter 'Ankey," they called him, and muttered about 
 him among themselves with down-bowed heads. 
 
 "Ain't he well then?" 
 
 "Why don't he bring a spittoon?" 
 
 Teddy heard them. And after that he swallowed the 
 phlegm, and it was not good for him. 
 
 In low-lying Mudsey on the river-bank consumption 
 was the peril that crept by night. In a house through the 
 archway a family of five had recently been carried off 
 by the White Scourge; and the day the last of them was 
 taken out feet first a new family had come in. 
 
 The sanitary inspector, the public health officer, the 
 guardians, the poor law medical officer were all earnest 
 and active in their attempts to combat the disease. And 
 of late a new and tremendous force had been coming to 
 
THE PLANK 207 
 
 the aid of the official army. The workingmen themselves 
 were waking to the danger and the need for precaution. 
 Education was raising them; experience was teaching 
 them; and most of all Doctor English, who had been 
 fighting the evil for thirty years, was never tired of telling 
 them that Prevention was within their reach if they would 
 work for it. It was largely owing to his efforts that of 
 late Mudsey's hoardings had been placarded with a mon- 
 ster bill: 
 
 CRUSADE AGAINST CONSUMPTION 
 
 IN THE UNITED KINGDOM 
 
 Consumption Every 
 
 Kills Jb Tenth 
 
 60,000 Person 
 
 Persons Dies of 
 
 Each Year 1 Consumption 
 
 Consumption can be prevented. 
 Will you help? 
 
 And in the centre was a picture of a nurse with a white 
 apron marked with a cross of blood. 
 
 One such placard stared the workers of Mapleton's in 
 the face as they emerged from the yard. On the evening 
 it first appeared they gathered in groups with upturned 
 faces in the Alley and read it. 
 
 Some of them spoke to the foreman, who looked at 
 
208 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Teddy, passing at the moment. Teddy felt the other's 
 eye upon him. 
 
 A day or two later a notice was fixed to the door of the 
 shop — 
 
 No spitting allowed in the shops. Employes in their own interests and 
 in that of their children are requested to see that this regulation is 
 respected. 
 
 Teddy stood before the notice and read it. 
 
 "Yes, that's you, my son," said a passing workman with 
 unusual brutality. 
 
 Teddy answered nothing. He was not ready of retort 
 nowadays. His mind was occupied. It was on the teapot 
 with the broken spout at the back of the cupboard in the 
 kitchen. 
 
 Teddy, a spendthrift by nature, but always rather in 
 excess, was swinging now to the other extreme. He was 
 becoming a miser. At one time he thought even of retir- 
 ing from his sick club to save the weekly subscription. 
 Luckily Miss English heard of the suggested economy and 
 crushed it with a characteristic word. Idiotic she called it. 
 
 Teddy was saving; but he wasn't saving fast enough to 
 please himself. He wanted more — a larger plank be- 
 tween his home and the Abyss. And a chance for secur- 
 ing such a plank came his way. 
 
 One day a brown-eyed German Jew called. He was a 
 little monkey of a man with high cheek-bones, a huge 
 
THE PLANK 209 
 
 mouthful of teeth, and a way of cocking his face to look at 
 you through pince-nez. He wore a smart top-hat and a 
 velvet-collared coat; but he deteriorated sadly nearer 
 earth, his boots being shabby, his trousers ragged at the 
 bottom. 
 
 Teddy, Meg in his arms, opened to him, and asked the 
 man his business. 
 
 He was it seemed the agent for the Atlas Life Insur- 
 ance Company of Canada. Would the gentleman like to 
 insure his child? He was in a position to offer him very 
 exceptional terms just now — very exceptional. 
 
 Teddy stared at him, breathing hard through his 
 nostrils. It was one of the originalities of the man, a 
 part perhaps of his inherited refinement, his vein of gentle 
 blood, that he had always refused with stubborn pride 
 to speculate on the death of his child. 
 
 Now he glared at the other. 
 
 "Insure her!" he said. "And what good would that 
 do me, Mister?" 
 
 The other showed his broad white fangs, treading deli- 
 cately. He was not sure of his ground. 
 
 "Why, sir, if anything was to come to her, you could 
 show her a little respect. See! Funeral expenses, and a 
 nice bit laid by." 
 
 "I see!" said Teddy. "God Almighty takes my Meg 
 to his bosom, and I draw five quid instead. That's it, 
 is it?" 
 
210 THE BOYAL ROAD 
 
 The insurance agent saw he had been on the wrong tack 
 and darted off upon another. 
 
 "Or insure yourself!" he said. "Insure yourself — on 
 be — 'alf of the child. Then if anything was to come to 
 you — there you are ! Your wife and child left 'andsomely 
 off. And you needn't worry in your grave." 
 
 Teddy, whose hand had been upon the door, opened a 
 little wider. 
 
 "Now you're talkin'," he said. "What can I insure 
 for?" 
 
 "What you like. Fifty pound. Hundred pound. 
 Only if you insure for the latter we should require a medi- 
 cal certificate." 
 
 Teddy said he'd think it over. 
 
 And all that night he lay awake thinking it over. 
 
 A hundred pounds between those he loved and the 
 Abyss if anything came to him! 
 
 And was something coming to him? 
 
 He was not so good a workman as he had been. 
 Toward the end of the day's work he flagged desperately. 
 A kind of swimming slackness seemed to have got hold 
 of him. His blood was turning to water. He was be- 
 coming undone. 
 
 And the work was always being speeded up; there was 
 an ever-increasing strain on the minds and muscles of the 
 workers; and in the jostle and hustle of the modern in- 
 dustrial stream the weaker vessels cracked. 
 
THE PLANK 211 
 
 Teddy was one of them. Leading hand on a splitting- 
 machine, his machine was now the slowest in the shop. 
 The other three hands were continually waiting upon their 
 leader. And they didn't like it: for they were paid by the 
 piece. And the foreman didn't like it: for he was respon- 
 sible for the total output of the shop. 
 
 Teddy believed the foreman had said something to Mr. 
 Edward, for Mr. Edward had glanced at him in passing, 
 a curious look in his eye. 
 
 And he sweated so! — his face hot as fire and hands 
 cold as a dead fish. 
 
 The Woodpecker was at work upon him again — in- 
 sidiously destructive. 
 
 Tap-tap ! tap-tap ! 
 
 Rising, he went to the window and stared out at the 
 night. The street was empty save for spectral lamp-posts. 
 The row of houses opposite crouched uncomely under 
 misty stars. From over the river came the desolate cry- 
 ing of a seagull. For the rest there was silence. 
 
 London slept. And in the heart of it one man amid 
 five millions, his face glued to the panes, looked out and 
 wondered. 
 
 Next evening he called round at the agent's office. 
 
 The agent was ingratiating, rose to greet him, gave 
 him his hand, and revealed a row of enormous yellow 
 teeth. 
 
212 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He soothed Teddy, coaxed him, flattered him, and made 
 up his mind for him. 
 
 "Will you go and see our doctor, or shall he come and 
 see you? " he asked at the end of the interview. 
 
 "I'll go and see him," said Teddy. 
 
 He had not told Loo what he meant to do, and did not 
 mean to tell her. 
 
 "Very well, sir," said the agent. 
 
 Next day Teddy went round to see the doctor. 
 
 Before entering he walked up and down in front of the 
 house, clearing his throat and tubes. He squared his 
 shoulders and breathed deep. He proposed to give 
 himself every chance. If there was anything wrong 
 with him it was just as well the doctor should not find 
 it out. 
 
 Then he entered. 
 
 The doctor spent a long time over his chest. 
 
 "Any weakness anywhere?" he asked. 
 
 "No, sir," said Teddy gaily. "Only in me 'ead, 
 through being a bit light-hearted." 
 
 "Catch a bit of cold sometimes in the winter?" 
 solicitously. 
 
 "Yes, sometimes, sir. . . . Get sweaty, you know, 
 at the work. And then comin' out in the cold night air 
 and that." 
 
 "Got one now? 
 
 "Just a bit of a sniffle like, sir." 
 
THE PLANK 213 
 
 The doctor tapped him back and front, leaned his ear 
 affectionately against the other's chest, and between his 
 shoulders, bid him breathe deep, and was very encourag- 
 ing and sympathetic. 
 
 "There, that's all," he said at last. 
 
 A little bald-headed man, he stood with his back to the 
 fire, and looked at the other with the small keen eyes of the 
 bird of prey curiously glittering. 
 
 "All right, ain't it?" said Teddy anxiously. 
 
 "You'll hear from the company," replied the doctor. 
 "I'll report to them." 
 
 Slowly he rose upon his toes and dropped on his heels 
 again. Teddy went out into the hall. The doctor fol- 
 lowed him. 
 
 "Good-bye," he said, opened the door, and gave the 
 other his hand. 
 
 "Good-bye, sir," said Teddy, surprised and flattered, 
 and went down the steps. 
 
 The door behind him did not bang. 
 
 At the foot of the steps he looked round. 
 
 The door was still ajar, and through the crack he could 
 see the doctor's eyes following him. 
 
 Whether they were laughing or not, he was not sure. 
 
 Teddy waited for three days and no news came from 
 the insurance company. On the fourth evening he went 
 round to the office. 
 
214 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The agent, tilting back in his chair by the gas-stove, 
 barely looked up from his paper. 
 
 He shook his head and resumed his reading. 
 
 "No," he said. 
 
 "What?" said Teddy. 
 
 "No good to us," said the agent, picking his teeth and 
 tilting himself. 
 
 Teddy gasped. 
 
 "Is there anything wrong then?" 
 
 "Go around and see your own doctor, my good man," 
 snapped the agent. 
 
 Teddy turned white. 
 
 " My man, is it? " he said. " It was Sir yesterday." 
 
xxin 
 
 THE ROT 
 
 Doctor English stood at the window of his study and 
 looked out; and it was clear that he was waiting for some- 
 thing to come down the street. 
 
 He had passed a heavy and disheartening day at his 
 sisyphean labour of atoning for the sins of Society. That 
 morning he had watched at the bedside of an old woman 
 dying of neglect hastened by starvation; in the afternoon 
 he had driven to the lying-in hospital a little girl in her 
 early teens; and later had been called in to the house of a 
 deaf-mute who had been brutally abusing the children 
 he should never have begotten. 
 
 It was an evening in early April and the rain was falling. 
 The house loomed mysterious through a gray bloom. In 
 his tiny strip of garden the black twigs of a leprous- 
 patched sycamore were radiant with silver drops. And 
 the sweet, thin song of a hedge-sparrow issued from the 
 tree. 
 
 The doctor's face of the bearded pioneer was wistful in 
 the dusk as he looked out of the window. 
 
 At the far end of the street a yellow light bloomed 
 
 215 
 
216 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 suddenly in the dusk. Then another blurted out — this 
 one nearer. Soon all down the street there was a dotted 
 chain of lights strung on high. Now the swift and shining 
 figure of the lamplighter was seen, hustling along, his pole 
 over his shoulder. As he came to each grim spectral lamp 
 he touched it with his magic wand, and the dead thing 
 leapt into life, and glowed mysterious and wonderful in 
 the gloom. 
 
 Doctor English watched him come and go with satis- 
 faction in his face. 
 
 Then he plunged down into his great chair to brood over 
 his gas-stove. 
 
 A maid entered. 
 
 "There's a man to see you, sir," she announced. 
 
 "All right. Show him into the surgery. I'll come." 
 
 Teddy stood by the fireplace, a wisp of red-haired man 
 in clothes too big for him. 
 
 Doctor English, entering, massive as a mountain, took 
 in his scarecrow patient with wise, deep eyes. 
 
 " Well, Teddy," he said. " You don't look up to much." 
 
 Teddy swaggered across to him on thin bowed legs. 
 He drew fresh fife from the feel of the other's hand, the 
 light in his eyes, the calm in his voice. That big man re- 
 vived in him a long dead self. He became cheery, coura- 
 geous — something of the old cock-robin of a boy, who had 
 haunted the school in Farthing Lane. 
 
THE ROT 217 
 
 "Well, sir," said Teddy. "I'm right enough. Only 
 I don't seem able to throw off me cough. And yesterday 
 I was passing a weighing machine and so thinks I, I'll 
 weigh. Found I'd lost a stone. And my wife wanted me 
 to come and see you. Says I've gone that thin." 
 
 " Let's look at that old chest," said the doctor. 
 
 For ten minutes he stood with his great head against 
 the other's phantom body, one hand on Teddy's back, 
 pressing him to his ear. He tapped his patient back and 
 front: he sounded him. 
 
 Then he turned to the fire. 
 
 "Button up your shirt," he said. 
 
 His back was to the other as he warmed his hands at 
 the blaze. 
 
 "Let's see! How long is it since you had that go of 
 pleurisy?" 
 
 "A year last March, sir." 
 
 There was a lengthy pause. 
 
 "How are things going at the works?" 
 
 "Why, sir, mighty dicky. They keep running on and 
 that's all they do do." 
 
 Teddy buttoned up his shirt, put on his coat, and stared 
 at the back of the doctor's head. He stood pale, haggard, 
 and quivering, trying to be collected in the presence of this 
 man he loved. 
 
 It was an age before the doctor turned. His beard was 
 on his chest, and his eyes grave. 
 
218 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "The best thing you can do is to take six months 
 off." 
 
 A gleam of the old Teddy lit the little cockney's blue 
 eyes. 
 
 "What! and gow a trip to Egypt in me yacht!" he 
 crowed. 
 
 The doctor did not smile. 
 
 "If I could get you into a hospital or home, would you 
 go?" 
 
 Teddy became ghastly grave. He shook his head. 
 
 " Can't do it, sir. I'd drop out. Ye see 'tain't only me. 
 There's Meg and the Missus — and I've only got the 
 one job. I been in leather all my life. If I was to lose 
 that I'd be done. I can't turn my hand to anything. 
 'Tain't as though I was a labourer, as the saying is." 
 
 He tied his muffler about his throat. 
 
 "I'll come and look you up sometimes," said the doctor 
 at the door. "Keep your windows open day and night. 
 And drink as much milk as you can — boiled" 
 
 He gave him certain directions about his sputum, es- 
 corted him to the door, and watched him down the steps. 
 
 Teddy danced slowly down them with a figment of the 
 old swagger. At the bottom he turned and came dully 
 back to the doctor standing at the top. 
 
 " Beg pardon, sir," he whispered huskily. " Is it that? " 
 
 The doctor eyed him steadily in the night. "It might 
 turn to it if you're not careful," he said. 
 
THE ROT 219 
 
 Then he shut the door and turned into the drawing- 
 room. 
 
 "Teddy Hankey's got it," he announced quietly to his 
 sister. 
 
 In Mudsey it was unnecessary to specify what it was. 
 
 The practical woman swung round in her hard chair. 
 
 "What's to be done?" she asked. 
 
 "Why, sit and watch the man rot," said the doctor. 
 "And six months hence when he's incurable take him in 
 hand." 
 
 The lady said, 
 
 "Brompton." 
 
 "Won't go," replied her brother. "Won't hear of it. 
 And I don't blame him." 
 
 He walked up and down the room. 
 
 "There's only one thing we can do," he said at length. 
 "We must save the child." 
 
 All the woman in the other rallied to his thought. She 
 did not, like her brother, dream of the Future and see Man 
 little by little entering on his heritage of Heaven on Earth. 
 What she saw was a little roundabout girl in a sheep- 
 skin jacket who must be kept happy and healthy at 
 all costs. 
 
 "The child mustn't sleep in the same room — if they've 
 got another," said the doctor. 
 
 "They have," replied Miss English. "I'll go around 
 and see about it to-morrow." 
 
220 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 And she went. 
 
 "Well, Mrs. Hankey, how's Meg?" she began. 
 
 "She's very well, Miss." 
 
 Loo turned from the washtub, her arms deep in soap. 
 She was no longer a lady of leisure; she was a work- woman 
 — and looked it. Shoulder to shoulder with her husband 
 she was struggling in grim battle against the world. Loo 
 was making money. Her red elbows, rather coarse, 
 showed it. Since Meg had gone to school she had taken 
 in washing. 
 
 "Teddy was seeing the doctor last night," continued 
 Miss English. 
 
 "Yes, Miss. He didn't say much when he got home." 
 
 She eyed the other anxiously, drying her arms. 
 
 "It's this cough," said Miss English. "The doctor's 
 afraid the child '11 catch it. Where does she sleep?" 
 
 "With us, Miss." 
 
 "Don't you think it would be better to put her in the 
 back room for a bit? We don't want the child to get her 
 father's cold." 
 
 The two women stared at each other. Then Loo went 
 suddenly white. 
 
 "Very well, Miss," she said. 
 
 "Now," said Miss English and marched upstairs. 
 The man of action in her always took the moment on 
 the wing. 
 
 "I'm afraid Teddy may not like it," murmured the 
 
THE ROT 221 
 
 lady in the quiet voice of a conspirator as together they 
 ran the little cot from room to room. 
 
 " No, Miss," said Loo. " But it's got to be." 
 Her voice was strangely hard and determined. Miss 
 English had always been right in attributing to her charac- 
 ter — the will to act when there was the need. And now 
 in a second she had made a momentous decision — the 
 decision many women are compelled at one time or another 
 to make. She had been called upon to choose between 
 her child and the father of her child. Swiftly and with- 
 out a falter she had made her choice. And with the choice 
 she had become a different woman — sterner, harder, more 
 masterful. The long mute struggle between her husband 
 and herself was over. She meant to rule, because she must. 
 Life, which is Love, required it of her. 
 
 When Teddy returned that night, Loo was at the sink. 
 She did not look round; and she heard him tramp upstairs. 
 
 "'Ellow!" he said, and walked across the landing to the 
 little back room. Then he tramped downstairs again. 
 The eyes of husband and wife met. There was resist- 
 ance in his; determination in hers — cold, calm, invinci- 
 ble. For perhaps a minute the conflict went on between 
 them in the air. Then he surrendered, and the resist- 
 ance died out of his face. 
 
 "All right," he said quietly. "I know," and passed 
 out into the street. 
 
XXIV 
 SPUN OFF 
 
 A sword had pierced Teddy's heart. 
 
 In the great and glorious days of old he and Loo had 
 stood together against the world, and nothing mattered. 
 Now that was no longer so. Loo was changed to him. 
 She was not his, and his only, as she once had been. 
 There was something else in her life; something that 
 divided her from him, and even set her against him. 
 
 He had felt it coming for long — a cloud on the horizon 
 no bigger than a man's hand, always looming larger in his 
 life; and he had resisted it furiously. 
 
 The Woodpecker was at work on him, unceasing and 
 unseen, down in the soft deeps of his heart. 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
 There was no sound; but he could feel the peck of the 
 remorseless beak, regular as a pulse. 
 
 Body and soul were being eaten away. 
 
 Teddy, deserted by the world, and uncertain of his 
 home, was becoming a desperately lonely man. His wife 
 was turning against him : that was how the situation pre- 
 sented itself to his diseased and isolated mind. 
 
 222 
 
SPUN OFF 223 
 
 Doctor English noticed a change in Loo, too, and said 
 that she was growing to look quite fierce. 
 
 "Perhaps she's got to be, poor thing," said Miss Eng- 
 lish. 
 
 The softest spot in her not unduly soft heart was kept 
 for the hundreds of women all about her battling against 
 odds to keep a home together, a man respectable, children 
 innocent and honest. And of those not the least valiant 
 as she knew was Loo Hankey, who stood in brown jersey, 
 her sleeves rolled up, over the washtub, fighting against 
 the world on behalf of her husband, her home, and most of 
 all her child. 
 
 Doctor English looked in on her one day. 
 
 "Well, Mrs. Hankey, how's Meg?" he asked. 
 
 "She's very well, sir." 
 
 He had not seen her for long and noticed the change 
 that had come over her. Her voice was hoarse, her 
 mouth set. No longer soft and round, she was haggard 
 and almost hard; and there was a look of strain in her eyes. 
 
 "Does her father fondle the child much? " 
 
 "Oh, yes, sir. She's hardly ever off his knee." 
 
 "I wouldn't let her do that," said the doctor quietly. 
 
 Loo said nothing, compressing her lips. 
 
 She asked no questions. It was unnecessary. 
 
 That evening when Teddy came home, he called Meg 
 to him. 
 
224 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The child didn't go. 
 
 "Won't you come to daddy then?" he coaxed. 
 
 Meg began to cry, and then ran out into the street. 
 
 Teddy looked at Loo. Then he understood. Some- 
 thing had passed between mother and child. A sudden 
 anger leapt in his heart. He stood up. 
 
 "That's you, you ?"he trembled, white and 
 
 flashing. 
 
 She met him with calm, determined eyes. 
 
 "That's the first time ever you called me, Ted," she 
 said quietly. 
 
 "Won't be the last, I'll lay," he laughed. 
 
 She did not weep — as she might have done a year or 
 two back; nor did he strike her. She was his master, and 
 he knew it. Morally she overpowered him. He was 
 struggling as a naughty boy struggles with his mother. 
 
 "Set her against me!" he trembled. "Might leave me 
 the child, if you turn against me yourself." 
 
 "Just while you've got your cough Ted," answered Loo 
 gently. 
 
 " I wish to God I could cough myself into hell — out 
 of this," he answered. "All turn on you when you're 
 going down. It's not only the chaps in the shop. I've 
 sweated to the bone to keep a roof over you, and you're 
 the first to round on me. One thing! — it won't last 
 much longer." 
 
 He went out without his tea. 
 
SPUN OFF 225 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
 Teddy was right. 
 
 It wouldn't last much longer. 
 
 The Wheel was spinning, spinning, and Teddy's hold 
 on it was loosening. He could no longer do his work. 
 But for Mr. Edward's intervention he would have been 
 sacked months ago — and he knew it. He sweated and 
 panted over work the other men did easily. 
 
 Once toward the end of a day he stopped the machine 
 for which he was responsible and leaned his forehead on 
 the bar of it. 
 
 His three mates waited restlessly on their leading hand. 
 
 He did not stir, his forehead leaning on the bar, his 
 eyes down. 
 
 The foreman came along in his white smock. 
 
 "What! — can't you get on with it, Hankey?" he said. 
 
 Teddy did not lift his head, did not answer. 
 
 Mr. Edward strolled up. 
 
 "Let him be," he said quietly, and added to the three 
 waiting hands. "You'd better go home. He won't be 
 fit for anything more to-day." They put on their coats 
 and departed, muttering. 
 
 A few days later Teddy collapsed upon the floor at 
 midday. 
 
 They took him up and propped him against a pile of 
 split leathers. 
 
226 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He lolled there with bleak blue eyes, refusing the brandy 
 offered him. 
 
 " 'Tain't that," he said. " Let me be. I'll go on soon." 
 
 Later he rose, took off his apron, and rolled it up. 
 
 "I give up, sir," he said quietly to the foreman. "It's 
 too much for me. I can't manage no more." 
 
 "Very well, Hankey," said the foreman kindly. "You 
 look as if you want a bit of a holiday." 
 
 He went out, passing for the last time through the lime- 
 pits and amidst the heavy-clogged fleshers and unhairers 
 busy at their ghastly work. 
 
 In the yard Mr. Edward was standing. 
 
 Teddy went across to him. 
 
 "Good-bye, sir," he said. "Thank you." 
 
 The young man gave him his hand. 
 
 "What! — are you leaving us?" he said. 
 
 "Yes, sir," said Teddy, calm and white. 
 
 "Trying another job." 
 
 "No, sir," said Teddy. "I'm done." 
 
 The other's face clouded. 
 
 "The work too much for you?" 
 
 "No, sir. 'Tain't the work," said Teddy. "It's me." 
 
 The young man's eyes dwelt on the other a thought 
 furtively, and marked the mysterious beauty in his face. 
 
 "I'm sorry," he said. "I hope you'll soon be better." 
 
 "Good-bye, sir," said Teddy. "Thank you" and 
 passed on. 
 
SPUN OFF 227 
 
 Mr. Edward's eyes followed the thin figure down the 
 narrow yard. He knew the man by sight and had often 
 noticed him, especially of late — that haggard, blue-eyed, 
 red-haired wisp of a creature, but he didn't know what his 
 name was. 
 
 Under the archway Teddy peeped into the porter's hut. 
 
 Big Belly sat dumped within. 
 
 "Good-bye, Mr. Sugar," he said. "Shake 'ands." 
 
 The other rolled off his stool. 
 
 "What, 'Ankey!" he said, concerned. "You ain't 
 leavin' us." 
 
 "That's right. I'm off." 
 
 "Whereto?" 
 
 "Kingdom Come," said Teddy, and passed out of the 
 archway into the cold, hard light of a January day. 
 
XXV 
 
 TAP-TAP 
 
 He walked quietly down the street, his apron on his 
 shoulder. 
 
 Meg was playing in the street, but he passed her by 
 without a word. 
 
 Loo met him in the door. 
 
 " Turned off? " she said. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 It was not true, but it was near enough. 
 
 Loo was not surprised, not even deeply moved. She 
 had expected it too long. 
 
 "It's just as well," she said kindly. "You ain't fit 
 for work. You're a bag of bones." 
 
 Teddy went indoors and took off his boots. 
 
 That evening Loo took the teapot with the broken 
 spout from the cupboard and dug out the hoard that 
 lay beneath the tea. 
 
 It amounted to twenty pounds odd. 
 
 " Come! " said Loo. " Not so bad. Twenty pound 
 is twenty pound." 
 
 228 
 
TAP-TAP 229 
 
 "Yes," said Teddy. "And you with a kid comin\ 
 When are you due? " 
 
 "April, if I'm right/' said Loo simply. "You must 
 go on your club." 
 
 Next day he went round to see the club doctor. 
 
 "Oh, yes, you may go on your club all right," said that 
 functionary cheerfully after a cursory examination. 
 
 He gave his patient a bottle of medicine and told him 
 he would come round and see him. 
 
 Teddy took the bottle of medicine home and tasted it 
 on the way. It was dark-coloured and highly flavoured 
 with peppermint. He liked it; and because he liked it, 
 he doubted its efficacy. Therefore he turned into a che- 
 mist's shop and bought a bottle of somebody's famous 
 lung-tonic, highly recommended by the chemist, who made 
 100 per cent, on each bottle sold. 
 
 The famous lung-tonic fulfilled all the conditions of a 
 successful patent medicine. It was expensive, and it 
 smelt strong. The chemist told Teddy that a dozen 
 bottles, more or less, should make a new man of him. 
 Teddy tasted that too. It was thick and creamy and 
 took some swallowing; and Teddy felt there was a power 
 in it. He returned to Loo with a bottle in each pocket, 
 and some hope in his heart. 
 
 Loo waited at home rather anxiously to know if he had 
 been allowed on his club. 
 
 "Is that right?" she asked. 
 
230 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "That's right enough," he answered. 
 
 "Come!" said Loo cheerfully. "We ain't done yet. 
 You done your bit. Now see what I can do." 
 
 "What can you do? " croaked Teddy. Nothing seemed 
 very real to him just now. " Work ! Nobody '11 take you. 
 Kid coming April. What can you do?" 
 
 "Let lodgings, to be sure." 
 
 "I don't want no lodger in my We," said Teddy, his 
 old fastidiousness reasserting itself. 
 
 "Go on," said Loo with quiet determination. "He 
 won't hurt you." 
 
 She kept him rather strictly at home in those first days 
 till it was dusk. She didn't wish him to be seen at street 
 corners. That meant no tick, or short tick. And Loo 
 was becoming wary as a vixen. There were eyes every- 
 where, and eyes were enemies. She was no longer open 
 and above-board: she could not afford to be. The world 
 was against her; aud she had to meet the world with its 
 pwn weapon — cunning. 
 
 So she went round herself to Levi, the second-hand 
 furniture man, by night. And by night he came round 
 and inspected the furniture in her parlour. 
 
 For it he offered her a bed, wash-hand-stand, and cheap 
 chest of drawers. 
 
 "We give £4—15-0 for the burrow alone," said Loo. 
 
 "Daresay," replied the Jew, picking his teeth. "It's 
 only the front's mahogany. All the rest's deal painted." 
 
TAP-TAP 231 
 
 M We got it off of you," said Loo. 
 
 The Jew folded his hands on his paunch and lifted his 
 face solemnly to the light. 
 
 "Yes or no," he said. 
 
 She accepted his offer, and asked him to send round 
 after dark. The long-nosed Jew smiled secretively. 
 
 "I know," he said. 
 
 He sent round next night and took away the bureau, 
 the glass-case full of birds of paradise, a knickknack table 
 and some chairs — things the young pair had sallied out 
 arm in arm to buy in the first glow of their married life, 
 and which for seven years had furnished or encumbered 
 their front-room. 
 
 Teddy in his shirt-sleeves watched thin-necked from the 
 kitchen. 
 
 Every now and then he made a little noise. 
 
 Whether it was a snort or a laugh, it was hard to say 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
 The parlour became a bedroom; and in the window now 
 appeared a card: 
 
 Bed Sitting-room to Let. 
 Foe a Respectable Man. 
 
 Loo was lucky and got a lodger in a week. He was a 
 foreman compositor earning good money. 
 
232 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Mr. Johns was fussy: fussy about his health, fussy 
 about his food, fussy with the fussiness of the middle- 
 aged bachelor who has saved money and means to 
 save more. 
 
 He made no trouble about paying and Loo's heart 
 lifted. 
 
 Miss English, coming round to inquire after Teddy, 
 found the old Loo smiling at her. 
 
 "He's on his club, Miss," said Loo in answer to the 
 other's inquiry. 
 
 "Yes; and what " Miss English began, and stopped 
 
 herself with a jerk. 
 
 She was going to ask what his sick club gave him and 
 for how long as compared with the Friendly Society he had 
 not joined at her instigation years ago. 
 
 Then she refrained with an effort from pointing the 
 moral. She was suffering just now herself, and her pain 
 made her unusually tender. The morning's post had 
 brought news that her old mother abroad was ailing. 
 
 Loo now faced the Monday morning young man when 
 he came for the rent with her old courage. 
 
 "That's my lodger," she said loftily. "He's foreman 
 compositor at the Albion works." 
 
 "Yes; I see you got your card down," answered the 
 other, signing the book. 
 
 "Yes," she said. "He's come to stay." 
 
 She did her lodger's washing, mended his socks, made 
 
TAP-TAP 233 
 
 him comfortable, and kept Meg quiet; for Mr. Johns did 
 did not care for children. 
 
 He was a man of few words and simple. Loo liked him; 
 Teddy didn't care for him. 
 
 Then one evening as Mr. Johns was walking home a 
 woman in the Row standing in the door of a house that 
 had in its window a card "Bedroom to Let," plucked 
 stealthily at his arm as he passed. He paused. The 
 woman nodded significantly at Teddy, who was hunting 
 down the street in the dusk. 
 
 "Lodging with the 'Ankeys, ain't you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 She pointed mysteriously at Teddy's back. 
 
 "You know?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 She tapped her chest and coughed. 
 
 Her own husband had been unemployed for weeks and 
 seemed likely to remain so. She had dropped two weeks' 
 rent, and the company was already pressing her. And 
 she had five children. 
 
 That evening Mr. Johns told Loo that he was going at 
 the end of the week. 
 
 Loo turned white. 
 
 "Ain't I made you comfortable then, Mr. Johns?" 
 
 "Yes, you made me very comfortable," answered the 
 man. "' Tain' t that." 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
234 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He pointed sheepishly to the kitchen. 
 
 "His cough," he said. "Keeps me awake at night." 
 
 He went on Saturday and took up his abode with the 
 woman up the street. 
 
 Loo stood in the door and challenged her enemy furi- 
 ously. 
 
 "And so you got my lodger away from me, Mrs. Lar- 
 kin!" she called harshly. 
 
 Doctor English, passing on his bicycle, did not recognize 
 her. 
 
 Mrs. Larkin was lean and tough as leather — an old 
 soldier with nearly fifty years' campaigning behind her. 
 If she had a conscience, it experienced no qualms. 
 
 "There's no sickness* in my house," she answered, tran- 
 quil in her triumph. "And he's very particular is Mr. 
 Johns." 
 
 "And may you never 'ave no sickness in your house — 
 that's all I pray," cried Loo quivering. 
 
 "I buried four," said the other enigmatically. "And 
 I got five still. You've only the one." 
 
 In her own view she had right on her side in the propor- 
 tion of five to one. 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
 Loo was left without a lodger. The only money coming 
 into the house now was Teddy's sick-pay, which did not 
 
TAP-TAP 235 
 
 cover the rent; and there were but three weeks more of 
 that. 
 
 That evening she took the broken-spouted teapot from 
 its hiding-place in the cupboard and counted her hoard; 
 and as she did so her confidence returned. 
 
 There was plenty there to see her through her trouble 
 and carry them well on into the summer. 
 
 Teddy sat by uneasily as she told out the gold. 
 
 Suddenly she turned on him. 
 
 "It's two pound short !" she cried fiercely. "Where 
 is it?" 
 
 Teddy sniggered feebly. 
 
 "I swallowed it," he said, and pointed to the rows of 
 empty bottles of lung-tonic on the mantelpiece. "Bet- 
 ter'n beer," he added apologetically. 
 
 The club doctor had said that he would visit Teddy, 
 but he had not come; or was it to be wondered at, seeing 
 that the club paid him at the rate of 4d. a visit. And 
 Teddy had made up for the omision by a debauch on 
 patent medicines, taking them promiscuously and often. 
 At first his faith in them, born of their faith in them- 
 selves, and backed by the chemist's consummate confi- 
 dence, had lit his night with a gleam of hope; but that had 
 soon passed. 
 
 "I shan't take no more," he said. 
 
 "That you won't!" cried Loo almost brutally. "Quack- 
 eries! — do ye no good." 
 
236 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "You wouldn't care if it did," said Teddy quietly. 
 " Only so long as you was all right." 
 
 Loo's lips pressed thin. 
 
 " Never mind about me," she said, dead- white. " What 
 about Meg — and the kid I'm carryin'?" 
 
 "Blast the lot o' you," said Teddy, very still. 
 
 He was like that now — at times. 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
 That evening when he went out, Loo hid the teapot on 
 a loose brick up the chimney. 
 
 The card went up in the window again. 
 
 For a time Loo did not let. It was known now what 
 Teddy's trouble was; and the better class of lodger went 
 elsewhere. One or two applications she refused. 
 
 Once get a man into the house, you may find it hard to 
 get him out; and he may live on you, instead of you on him. 
 
 Hard put to it, she accepted at last a man of whom 
 somehow she was suspicious. 
 
 He was a different type of man to the last. Mr. Low- 
 enthal was young and flashy, and said he was a commercial 
 traveller in jewellery. And certainly there was a profusion 
 of rings upon his fingers. He was tall and dark, with a 
 touch of the Semitic about him. His manners were beauti- 
 ful, his moustache waxed, his hair sleek. He made a great 
 
TAP-TAP 237 
 
 deal of Meg, who didn't like him, though she liked the 
 sweets he gave her. He said Thanks instead of Thank you, 
 and I beg your pardon. 
 
 Teddy said he was gentlemanly, and hobnobbed with 
 him. Loo didn't like him so much. He reminded her of 
 Swiney. And like Swiney he was a great Socialist, but 
 unlike Swiney an idealist and a dreamer. And of evenings 
 he would discourse with eloquence on the Brotherhood of 
 Man, Universal Peace, and the Federation of the World. 
 
 Teddy called him Steenie. 
 
 When Teddy was out Steenie was very fond of coming 
 into the kitchen — too fond, Loo thought, and too friendly, 
 but the man paid his rent. 
 
 One day she heard him behind her and turned. 
 
 "'Ullo, little girl," he said softly. 
 
 She looked up. He was standing in the door, tall and 
 dark and smiling. His face was tilted; and there was a 
 meretricious light on it and in his red-hot eyes. 
 
 "He's gone out for the afternoon, ain't he?" 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "Old Huskey." 
 
 He sauntered toward her. 
 
 "I've locked the door," he said. "Are you for a bit of 
 fun?" 
 
 Consciously or unconsciously she put her hand on a 
 boiling saucepan. 
 
 He showed his teeth, hissed slightly, and withdrew into 
 
238 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 his room with a smile and a little bow. Mr. Lowenthal 
 was always very much the gentleman. 
 
 His room was between Loo and the street. She crept 
 upstairs into her bedroom and locked the door. 
 
 Then she lay down on her bed and gasped. 
 
 In the room beneath she could hear Lowenthal stirring. 
 The street-door shut quietly. Loo did not leave her room 
 till she heard Teddy enter. Then she crept downstairs 
 in pitiful mood, for the first time for months seeking his 
 strength of a man to succour her failing womanhood. 
 
 Teddy was in the lodger's room looking round. 
 
 " Lowenthal done a guy ! " he said. " Where's his bag? " 
 
 Loo gasped and rushed for the chimney. 
 
 "It's gone!" she screamed. 
 
 "What's gone?" asked Teddy harshly. 
 
 "The coin." 
 
 She collapsed upon a chair and flung her apron over her 
 head. 
 
 "We're done," she sobbed. 
 
 Teddy took command ruthlessly. 
 
 "Where was it? You 'id it from me?" 
 
 "Up the chimney." 
 
 He searched and swore, and swore and searched, show- 
 ing no mercy. This plank that he had made with so 
 much labour to stand between him and his and the Abyss 
 had been snatched from beneath their feet. And she was 
 responsible. 
 
TAP-TAP 
 
 "This comes o' lodgers," he muttered. "This is what 
 I tell you." 
 
 "You liked him better than me," sobbed Loo beneath 
 her apron. 
 
 "Now then," bullied Teddy. "None o' that. Eat 
 your own dirt." 
 
 She had trampled on him when he was down, and now 
 that it was her turn he would not spare her. 
 
 He shuffled round to the police-station and told his 
 story. 
 
 "How much was it?" asked the inspector. 
 
 "A matter of fifteen quid." 
 
 The inspector shook a sagacious head. 
 
 "That's enough to take him to Canada. Where was 
 it kept?" 
 
 "Teapot up the chimney." 
 
 "Ah, that's an old dodge. He'd be up to that." 
 
 He took down the particulars, and gave no hope of 
 recovery. 
 
 Teddy trotted home. 
 
 "No more — lodgers," he said. "This is what I told 
 you all along. Only you would 'ave it." 
 
 Loo was still collapsed. 
 
 Tap-tap! tap-tap! 
 
XXVI 
 THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS 
 
 When Loo came to herself she found the parlour 
 stripped of all furniture save the pictures on the wall and 
 the ornaments upon the mantelpiece. 
 
 Bed, chest of drawers, and wash-hand-stand were 
 gone. 
 
 In the middle of the bare floor stood Meg and 
 laughed. 
 
 "Ain't it funny, mum?" she said. 
 
 Loo swept the child up in her arms and kissed her 
 passionately. 
 
 "Here's the rent," said Teddy firmly, and handed her 
 the money. "I cleared that." 
 
 She took it quietly, saying nothing. As yet she had not 
 resumed mastery. 
 
 "How long does your club run on? " she asked. 
 
 "I'm out," Teddy replied. "When are you due?" 
 
 "Six weeks." 
 
 She sat down to work out the situation. 
 
 "If we can hold on till I'm through my trouble," was 
 her prevailing thought. 
 
 240 
 
THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS 241 
 
 That afternoon she went round to see Miss English, the 
 woman of resource, who could help her if anybody could. 
 
 As she came down the street she saw a solid brown figure 
 plunging into a cab. Then the cab with its dowdy black 
 back rolled away. And the cab was laden high with 
 luggage. 
 
 The maid was still standing on the steps looking after 
 it as Loo came up. 
 
 Bad news had come by telegram that morning. Old 
 Mrs. English was worse — dying, the maid understood. 
 Miss English had to go at once, and the doctor would fol- 
 low as soon as he could get away. 
 
 Loo walked home. On her way she turned into Levi's 
 and bought a large screen with which to hide the nakedness 
 of the front-room from the eyes of the Monday morning 
 young man. She also asked Levi if he would let her have 
 a bed and bedroom furniture upon tick. The Jew shook 
 his greasy head. He knew very well how things were 
 going with the Hankeys. 
 
 "Later," he said, "perhaps. You don't want a lodger 
 just now. You want to look after yourself." 
 
 Loo went round to a laundry, seeking work. A fore- 
 woman, a motherly creature, ran over her figure with 
 critical eye. 
 
 "Why, you must be almost due," she said. 
 
 On Monday, after the rent had been paid, there was 
 five shillings between her home and the Abyss. 
 
242 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "We must sell up," she said. 
 
 "That's it," said Teddy quietly. " Sell the -ome up." 
 
 The home of, upon the whole, an honourable citizen of 
 London began to be broken up, while five millions of men 
 and women swarmed round and did nothing — in the 
 main because they did not know. 
 
 Teddy stared at the ruins he sat among. 
 
 "Meltin' away before my eyes," he said. 
 
 Little by little everything went — first the ornaments, 
 then the comforts, finally the necessaries. And it was 
 wonderful how little they fetched. 
 
 Tables and chairs followed books and knickknacks, and 
 clothes and blankets followed tables and chairs. 
 
 Soon the broken-spouted teapot that once had clinked 
 to gold was abrim with pawn-tickets. And Meg began to 
 whimper. 
 
 The only money coming into the house was that which 
 came from the pawnshop, and an odd shilling or two Loo 
 earned for a bit of washing or minding a neighbour's child. 
 
 Somehow she managed to pay the rent. But the Mon- 
 day morning young man was suspicious and would have 
 peeped round the screen into the bare parlour but that 
 Loo zealously guarded the door. 
 
 Once he heard Teddy coughing in the kitchen. 
 
 "What! — your husband out o' work?" he asked. 
 
 "No," said Loo swiftly, with the swiftness of the animal- 
 mother fighting for her young. "He's on his 'oliday." 
 
THE BRINK OF THE ABYSS 243 
 
 "Indeed," said the gentlemanly young man with the 
 irony on which he prided himself. "I trust he will enjoy 
 his 'oliday." 
 
 When he was gone Loo took Teddy sharply to 
 task. 
 
 "What you want sittin' there and lettin' him see you? 
 Want them at the office to know you're out." 
 
 "Don't see it makes much difference," said Teddy dully. 
 "He knows. They all know." 
 
 "How's he to know?" 
 
 "Plenty to tell him," said Teddy. "We're down now. 
 So they're all on to us." 
 
 Teddy's moods were various now as those of an April 
 day. Through his dulness ran a streak of laughing bit- 
 terness; and that again would pass before the mild glow of 
 a strange, mysterious love and hope and faith that seemed 
 at times to shine through him like the sun through Novem- 
 ber murk. 
 
 Drowning in the wide waters of the ocean-city, Teddy 
 splashed helplessly about. He paddled to the Labour 
 Bureau and applied for work he knew he could not do ; and 
 there was given a brown ticket and no hope of employ- 
 ment. He went to the Distress Committee and was told 
 that he might get a job on the roads at the end of a sledge- 
 hammer at some remote date. He went away uncom- 
 plaining. He had only applied to save his face. 
 
244 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Seems there ought to be some one to go to like," said 
 Loo. 
 
 "There is," answered Teddy. 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "Him the parsons talk of," replied Teddy with the quiet 
 bitterlessness that now distinguished him. "God the 
 Father. Only He ain't there. That's the only trouble 
 with God." 
 
 "I daresay He don't know," suggested Loo, charitable 
 even to the Almighty. 
 
 "Don't know or don't care. Which?" said Teddy. 
 "Makes ye and then lets ye rot. Is He dead or is He 
 blind? I could make a better God by spittin' on a lump 
 of putty and sittin' on it." 
 
 "Go on," said Loo, sane even in her extremity. 
 "You've been listening to them chaps at the street cor- 
 ner — Sunday night." 
 
 "I ain't," answered Teddy quietly. "I been listenin' 
 to no one — only meself ." 
 
XXVII 
 THE CRUCIFIED 
 
 To Teddy the struggle came to figure itself as a battle 
 in which the odds were round about five million to one 
 against him. And the conception afforded him some sar- 
 donic amusement. He crept about the streets and watched 
 the passersby with a curious, ironic smile in his failing 
 blue eyes. Men and women, bustling about their busi- 
 ness, would wonder who that rag of a red-haired man 
 might be, and what was the meaning of those mocking 
 eyes of his. 
 
 Teddy knew now what they meant to do to him, those 
 five million enemies of his who streamed by him in motley 
 flood, laughing and scolding, worried and imperturbable, 
 dingy and gay, making believe the most of them that they 
 did not see him. They meant to kill him — by letting him 
 alone. There would be no cruelty but that worst cruelty 
 of all, the insidious cruelty of neglect. In old days men 
 had been slain straightforwardly with blows — flogged, 
 bricked, bludgeoned to death, more or less swiftly. There 
 were no blows to-day, no brutality. Everybody was kind; 
 everybody was Christian; and everybody passed by on 
 
 245 
 
246 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 the other side. In that great city of church-bells for ever 
 ringing there were no good Samaritans. 
 
 So at least it seemed to Teddy. In fact he was wrong. 
 The streets of London swarmed with men and women 
 ready to help; but there was no organization to bring their 
 collective energy to bear. Patchwork here; plaster 
 there; huggermugger everywhere. 
 
 Once a lady, seeing this shadow of a man lolling hag- 
 gard and hollow against a wall at the street corner as he 
 watched the traffic with tired blue eyes, turned back and 
 offered him twopence. 
 
 Teddy shook his head, his arms still folded. 
 
 "Now," he said. "That won't help me." Something 
 in her face arrested him. "'Tain't you," he said. "It's 
 all on 'em." 
 
 The woman blushed. 
 
 "Oh, I beg your pardon," she muttered shyly and 
 hurried on. 
 
 He called after her, and she turned. He had unfolded 
 his arms. 
 
 "Thank you, Miss," he said, and touched his hat; and 
 she was amazed at the beauty of his smile. 
 
 Then they dropped a week's rent. 
 "I'll have it for you next week," Loo told the young 
 man at the door. 
 
 " Tis to be 'oped so," he answered with a covert grin. 
 
THE CRUCIFIED 247 
 
 Spurred by his words, she dragged round that afternoon 
 to see the vicar. 
 
 A young man, recently appointed to make up the head- 
 way the church had lost in Mudsey during the long reign 
 of a scholarly and passive predecessor, he was overworked 
 as only the clergy in the crowded quarters of the great 
 towns are — organizing, energizing, blowing on dying 
 embers, lighting new fires. 
 
 The vicar, kind as he was keen, knew nothing of Mrs. 
 Hankey, and detected her in a lie about the attendance of 
 her child at Sunday School. During the ten days in which 
 he had been installed he had received scores of such appli- 
 cations from scores of such straw-hatted, dingily dressed 
 women with hoarse voices. In the absence of Miss English 
 all Mudsey had rushed to him. The new vicar was young 
 and unmarried. He was probably kind and might be 
 innocent. And Miss English was not there to keep guard 
 over him. Moreover, there was a general impression 
 abroad among the women of Mudsey that the Church of 
 England after its long sleep was going up, and the Church 
 of Rome, which had had a long and good day, would 
 now decline. Therefore there was a remarkable secession 
 from the one church to the other going on. In the main 
 it took the form of continual ringings at the vicarage door 
 and unending applications such as Loo's. 
 
 The vicar was genuinely kind and courteous. 
 
 He bade his visitor sit down, and when she went showed 
 
248 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 her to the door himself. But he could do nothing. As 
 he opened the door, he said shyly that he hoped she had 
 not far to walk; and added tentatively that if she was very 
 pressed it might be as well to apply to the Relieving 
 Officer. 
 
 Loo dragged home, weary in heart and body. She was 
 too tired for anything, as she told Mrs. Baxter. 
 
 In the kitchen Teddy was crouching over the fire, Meg 
 sniffling listlessly in the corner. 
 
 The child was no longer chubby and chuckling. She 
 reflected the change that had taken place in her environ- 
 ment. The lif e had died out of her as it had died out of 
 the home. She was almost gaunt, dirty in face, dingy in 
 clothes. The little sheepskin coat, the imitation ermine 
 muff, the rabbit-skin boa had long been pawned. And 
 she had ringworm. 
 
 Loo sat down heavily. Meg sniffled in the corner. 
 
 " What's the matter with ye? " snapped the mother. 
 
 "You let her be," coughed Teddy. "She's not inter- 
 ferin' with you." 
 
 Loo's eyes flared and then subsided. She put her hands 
 on her knees. 
 
 "I can't do no more, Ted," she said. "See what a size 
 I am! You must go round and see Starkie." 
 
 The sea-green mists invaded Teddy's face. He rose. 
 
 "I ain't a-goin* there," he said quietly and went 
 out. 
 
THE CRUCIFIED 249 
 
 He was in one of those mild and moon-like moods which 
 gleamed fitfully between the dull wastes of his despair and 
 the squalls of bitterness that swept over him. 
 
 Quietly he crept down Mudsey Wall amid the river- 
 side business of ranked barges and warehouses and cranes 
 and sacks ascending and descending, and huge wagons 
 with hairy horses blocking the narrow way, and dusty men 
 white with handling grain come from all the ends of the 
 earth to fill the immense maw of a city the like of which 
 no man has ever seen. 
 
 Half way down the Wall he stayed at the steps which 
 led down between tall warehouses to his old haunt beside 
 the river. It was low tide and the little patch of beach 
 where he had courted Loo and come with her and her 
 baby on summer days in their early married life was ex- 
 posed. He descended to it and stood on the wet brown 
 mud beside the swift stream. 
 
 His face was wistful as he looked out over the familiar 
 and mysterious waters. 
 
 "Keeps on a-callm'," he muttered, and bending let it run 
 through his spread fingers. 
 
 Then he rose and gazed across the smooth, mist-swathed 
 reaches, to the far shore dim through mist. 
 
 Reluctantly he turned and ascended the steps into the 
 narrow abyss of Mudsey Wall. 
 
 At the top he stayed to breathe and cough. 
 
 Above the sporadic noises in the warehouses about 
 
250 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 him rose a sweet humming sound, rhythmic and 
 regular. 
 
 It was the children of the South Lane school at the back 
 singing their evening hymn: 
 
 "Abide with me; fast falls the eventide." 
 
 Teddy leaned against the wall with his eyes shut. 
 
 A grave voice said at his ear : 
 
 "Hullo, Ted?" 
 
 He turned to find Doctor English at his side. 
 
 "Hullo, sir." 
 
 "What are you doing here?" 
 
 "Listenin'." 
 
 "Ah," said the other. "I know," and ran his arm 
 through his friend's. 
 
 Teddy glanced up. His swift and generous impulses 
 told him that the need of this man he loved was greater 
 than his own. 
 
 "There! they can't 'arm ye, not really, sir," he said in 
 low voice that came murmuring mysteriously from the 
 deeps of him. "I know they can't. It's only a kind of 
 pretend like." 
 
 "Ah, you've heard," said the doctor. 
 
 "Yes, sir. The old lady." 
 
 All Mudsey that knew Doctor English knew that his 
 mother was dying somewhere abroad, and that he had not 
 as yet gone to her because a lad run over by a wagon in the 
 
THE CRUCIFIED 251 
 
 Wall and at the point of death had been living for days on 
 his vitality. 
 
 The doctor glanced at the other with kind eyes. 
 
 "I don't think I'm the only one," he said. "You've 
 been having a bad time too, old boy." 
 
 "A bit rough, sir," said Teddy deprecatingly 
 
 "I've been meaning to come round, and look you up," 
 said the doctor. "Miss English asked me to. But I've 
 had one very bad case, and a lot of others. I'm off to- 
 night." 
 
 "'Ope you'll be in time, sir," said Teddy. 
 
 "I don't doubt that," answered the doctor. "She 
 won't go till I've been there." 
 
 "She'll go the right way all right, I'll lay," said Teddy 
 simply. 
 
 The doctor laughed as of old. 
 
 "I'll tell her that," he said, and was gone. 
 
 Teddy crept quietly on. 
 
 Feeling tired he turned into an old church, dingy amid 
 tombstones and black-limed sycamores. The hush of the 
 House of God comforted him. He was alone in there 
 save for a gaunt priest who prowled up and down with a 
 wonderfully uplifted look on his ascetic face. In a corner 
 before a shrine a candle burnt feebly in the dusk. Teddy 
 approached it, attracted by he knew not what in the 
 nicker of the flame. In the shrine was the figure of the 
 
252 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Crucified stripped, naked, and crowned with thorns. The 
 figure drew him. Almost unconsciously he dropped down 
 on the kneeling board and stared. 
 
 The priest with the beauty in his face approached 
 him. 
 
 Teddy rose. 
 
 "D'you know who that is?" asked the priest quietly, 
 his eyes smiling at the other. 
 
 "Yes, sir," said Teddy. "Him they call the Son of 
 Man." 
 
 The other nodded. 
 
 "The Son of God," he said. "The Crucified." 
 
 Teddy was silent for a time, breathing deep. 
 
 A fire seemed smouldering within him. 
 
 "I reckon He knew all about it," he said. "They did 
 Him down a treat. But He beat 'em in the end." 
 
 The priest's eyes ran over the shabby scarecrow of a 
 man climbing his Calvary, it was clear, bowed down be- 
 neath the weight of the Cross that maybe his country had 
 laid on his weak shoulders. 
 
 Suddenly a smile illuminated his face. 
 
 "Yes," he said, "and He forgave them." 
 
 Quietly Teddy walked down Archery Row. 
 
 It was an April evening, holy and happy. A soft wind 
 was blowing across the city, breathing of primroses and 
 violets far away; and a peep of fairest blue opened above 
 
THE CRUCIFIED 253 
 
 him between white clouds. His mood was that of the 
 evening. 
 
 Then his eye caught a cage upon the wall. In the boxes 
 to either side of it shoots of green emerged; but from the 
 cage there came no song. 
 
 He looked up and could see no bird patrolling to and 
 fro in its tiny prison. 
 
 He knocked at the door of the house. A woman came. 
 
 Teddy stared up at the cage. 
 
 "He's done," he said. "His heart's broke." 
 
 The woman smiled. 
 
 "He's only laying down at the bottom of his cage," she 
 said. "Sweet! Sweet!" and she stood back in the road 
 to look. 
 
 Teddy shook his head. 
 
 "He's beat you," he said. "He's out." 
 
 He walked away. As he turned into the house he saw 
 the woman up the street entering the door, the cage in her 
 hand. 
 
 Teddy smiled. 
 
 "You can't get him back," he muttered. "He's 
 gone — where you can't follow with your cage." 
 
 In the kitchen Meg was crying in the corner. 
 "Ain't she well then?" asked Teddy gently. 
 Loo's mouth began to wriggle. 
 "She's hungry," she said. "No milk nor nothing." 
 
254 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Meg," called Teddy tenderly. 
 
 "Yes, daddy." 
 
 The child came and stood before him in her rags, her 
 little face stained with tears and dirty. 
 
 He went down on his knees on the bare floor before her. 
 
 The child's toe gleamed naked through a hole in her 
 boots. 
 
 He bent and kissed it. 
 
 Then he looked up at her. 
 
 Her blue eyes smiled at him through rain. 
 
 He rose and going to the door gazed up at the soft gray- 
 bosomed sky. 
 
 Tn his own mute way he was praying. 
 
XXVIII 
 THE RELIEVING OFFICER 
 
 Mr. Starkie was the Relieving Officer of Mudsey, and 
 he conceived of himself as a consecrated Caesar. 
 
 It was his life-regret that he had not been a soldier like 
 his father before him. Of that father he was wont to say 
 that he had been on the Staff, though he did not add that 
 his position on the Staff was that of Pay-Sergeant. 
 
 Mr. Starkie himself was an OFFICER in capital letters, 
 a Relieving Officer; and he did not like you to forget it. 
 
 He had the military soul, and a martial bearing, which 
 he cultivated. A tall man with a heavy cavalry mous- 
 tache and a thrusting chin, which he liked his friends to 
 describe as masterful, he marched with long strides about 
 the business of the State, a bag in his hand. His hero was 
 Lord Kitchener; his favourite line: 
 
 "A still strong man in a blytant land." 
 
 He was good friends with the local captain of the Church 
 Army, but he envied him his title. Also it was a profound 
 if secret grief to him that the captain refused to discuss 
 dogma with him, implying in a gentlemanly way (for he 
 
 255 
 
256 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 was well-bred and connected by marriage with a curate) 
 that such matters were outside the sphere of Relieving 
 Officers, and best left to their spiritual superiors — names 
 and occupations unspecified. 
 
 The insinuation, however gentle, wounded Mr. Starkie 
 all the more, in that himself, a man of character and im- 
 mense determination, he had continued his education till 
 late in middle life, reading Shakespeare doggedly until he 
 slept and learning French long after most men have for- 
 gotten it. And if he had the egoism natural to the man 
 who has raised himself at the cost of considerable sacrifice 
 till he is intellectually advanced enough to realize very 
 clearly his superiority to the society in which he moves, he 
 had some justification for it. 
 
 Once he had even written a letter to the Spectator on the 
 "Manufacture of Paupers," which the editor of that paper 
 had described as admirable. 
 
 Mr. Starkie was the one man in Mudsey to whom Doc- 
 tor English was consistently unjust. 
 
 The doctor disliked the man, disliked his office, and Mr. 
 Starkie retorted in kind. 
 
 The two were enemies of old. And their enmity was 
 inevitable and ineradicable. It arose out of the clash 
 between two temperaments fundamentally opposed. The 
 friction between them had long ago induced Doctor Eng- 
 lish to resign his post as Poor Law Medical Officer, and 
 
THE RELIEVING OFFICER 257 
 
 he had taken his place instead upon the Board of Guar- 
 dians — to check and counter his enemy. 
 
 Both were well-intentioned men and just — except about 
 the other; but they were essentially unsympathetic; 
 and after twenty-five years' war they had only to meet to 
 bristle. The scenes between the two men upon the 
 Board of Guardians had long been the talk of Municipal 
 Mudsey. 
 
 For those who knew Doctor English the situation could 
 be revealed in the flash of a phrase: Mr. Starkie was a hard 
 man. 
 
 He was a churchman and a strong conservative. In 
 politics therefore, in principle, and in personality, the two 
 men were mutually antipathetic. 
 
 The doctor was a little before his times, the Relieving 
 Officer a little behind them — the space between them 
 ever growing as with the years, the one still advanced and 
 the other retired. Doctor English stood for the advent of 
 the Love which was streaming on faint and beautiful 
 wings out of the Dawn, Mr. Starkie for the Force which 
 was retreating sullenly and with lashing tail into the 
 Hinterland of Time. Both were good men; and for 
 each the principle for which he stood was a religion. 
 
 Mr. Starkie said that Doctor English spoilt the poor; 
 and the doctor replied that Mr. Starkie bullied them. 
 And there was more than a grain of truth in both indict- 
 ments : for each erred somewhat in the direction that was 
 
258 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 most natural to him; but each overshot the mark in label- 
 ling the other respectively tyrant and sentimentalist. 
 
 And if Mr. Starkie was a hard man, and tended to grow 
 harder with experience, it may be that he had some reason 
 to be. All his working life had been spent examining, 
 adjudicating on, and in the main resisting the claims of 
 those who desired or had been driven to live in part or 
 wholly on their neighbours without return of labour done. 
 And if thirty years of constant contact with the cadging 
 class had left him suspicious and cynical, his heart some- 
 what shrivelled, his will hardened, the fount of pity drying 
 within him, it is hardly to be wondered at. For ten hours 
 of every working day he was in conflict with those whom 
 indolence sometimes and more often necessity compelled 
 to squeeze the most they could out of their neighbours 
 through him; and he found them, as he truly said, cunning 
 as foxes. 
 
 A faithful worker, just according to his lights, he had 
 his duty to the taxpayer to consider and his duty to the 
 destitute. To be fair to both, this was his by no means 
 easy task. On several occasions he had been subjected 
 to physical injury, and frequently to furious abuse, by 
 those who sought his aid, and more than once arrainged 
 by Society or at the Bar of Public Opinion when a scan- 
 dal had arisen as the result of his severity. 
 
 It was his difficult business to discriminate between 
 those who had brought destitution on themselves and 
 
THE RELIEVING OFFICER 259 
 
 those on whom Society had brought it. Because he was 
 human he made mistakes — for which he paid in the dark 
 hours; because he was hard he made bad mistakes, erring 
 always on the side of severity, taught so to do by the 
 experience of thirty years. 
 
 Yet no man tried harder to do right. Often he would 
 drop in at homes late at night to find out if a man was 
 drunk or deserving; or a woman destitute through her own 
 fault or that of the community. 
 
 He was always overworked and usually harsh and irri- 
 table. And if Doctor English satid with some truth that 
 he cross-examined every applicant as if he was a liar, it 
 must also be added with equal truth that nine out of ten 
 of them were so. For Mr. Starkie's reputation for severity 
 kept the respectable poor away. These went to him as 
 a last resource, and some not then. Not a few preferred 
 the refuge of the river or the halter to running the gauntlet 
 of his inquisition. Mr. Starkie was called deterrent with 
 some justice, and would reply that it was his duty to 
 deter. 
 
 Withal he was by no means a bad fellow. Most men 
 respected him, and in his own home he was well liked. 
 
 Mr. Starkie was sitting in his office, great ledgers 
 open before him, dealing with applicants, cross-examining 
 them, checking their answers in his ledgers, making rough 
 notes. 
 
 Most of his applicants were old customers. He dealt 
 
THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 with them briefly, bluntly, but here and there not 
 unkindly. 
 
 It was said in Mudsey that he had his favourites; but 
 he had not many of them. And if he was a hard man he 
 was not an inhuman one. 
 
 "It's my business to be brutal," he said sometimes with 
 characteristic sincerity; and perhaps he was right. 
 
 He had dispatched his last applicant, and rising from 
 his stool was shutting up his ledgers, when he heard feet 
 in the passage without. 
 
 "Come in," he ordered in the harsh reverberating voice 
 that should, he felt sure, have directed battalions on the 
 battlefield. 
 
 A shred of a man, flame-tipped, and hollow-cheeked, 
 entered. He was new to Mr. Starkie, though a not unu- 
 sual type. Men with much those hollow cheeks, those 
 bright eyes, and that pitifully transparent air often crept 
 into his office. But about this man there was something 
 peculiar. He was hardly sullen — as many were; he was 
 certainly not obsequious — as most were : there was about 
 him a kind of white defiance, pitiful if only by reason of its 
 impotence. He looked somehow like a phosphorescent 
 flame flickering bitterly in a draught before it expires. 
 
 He stood by the door with downward eyes, catching for 
 his breath. 
 
 "You're late," said Mr. Starke sharply. "I shut at 
 5.30. Who are you? What d'you want?" 
 
THE RELIEVING OFFICER 2(51 
 
 He was unusually harsh. His little boy was danger- 
 ously ill of bronchitis, and he wanted to be at the lad's 
 bedside. 
 
 "'Ankey — Edward 'Ankey." 
 
 "Come! speak up!" said the loud-voiced inquisitor. 
 "Hankey? Well, what is it, Hankey? What d'you 
 want? You're late, and I'm in a hurry." 
 
 Teddy twisted his cap, and his eyes wandered about 
 the room, seeking rest and finding none. 
 
 "Assistance," he said sullenly. 
 
 "Relief," replied Mr. Starkie. "Why can't you say 
 so?" 
 
 The other's eyes flashed, but he said nothing. 
 
 "Why d'you want relief?" continued Mr. Starkie. 
 
 "I'm clean'd out. That's why," Teddy answered, 
 stubborn and resisting. 
 
 Mr. Starkie was not favourably impressed. In his 
 mind he classified applicants in two sets — those who 
 called him Sir, and those who did not. There were very 
 few in the second category; and those rarely got much in 
 the way of out-relief. Mr. Starkie was of that vast con- 
 servative company who love independence in the abstract 
 and regard it as an essentially British attribute, but when 
 they meet it in the flesh speak of it harshly as insolence. 
 
 He eyed the other severely, feeling that here was a rebel 
 who needed discipline; and Mr. Starkie believed in dis- 
 cipline. 
 
262 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "What's the matter with you?" 
 
 "Out o' work." 
 
 "How long you been out?" 
 
 "Since the New Year." 
 
 "Where did you work?" 
 
 "Mapleton's." 
 
 The inquisitor's tone relaxed somewhat. 
 
 "Oh, you're one of them, are you? They're going 
 through bad times, I hear. How long did you work for 
 them?" 
 
 "Goin' on seventeen year." 
 
 Each was resisting the other a little less. 
 
 "What was your job?" 
 
 "Leading hand on a splitting-machine." 
 
 "What wage?" 
 
 Teddy swayed his head. 
 
 "It's all accordin'. Ours is piece-work. Might make 
 between two and three pound a week." 
 
 Mr. Starkie turned up a ledger and checked the 
 answer. Then he tilted his chair and pressed his finger- 
 tips together. 
 
 "That's not a bad wage. And you had it over a num- 
 ber of years. Did you save nothing?" 
 
 "A bit." 
 
 "How much?" 
 
 "A matter of twenty pounds." 
 
 Mi. Starkie nodded. 
 
THE RELIEVING OFFICER 263 
 
 "What's come to it?" 
 
 "Pinched." 
 
 "What? Come, my man, speak up." 
 
 "Stolen." 
 
 "Who by?" 
 
 "Lodger." 
 
 Mr. Starkie leaned back and suppressed a smile. 
 
 "What? When you was asleep?" 
 
 "No; I was out." 
 
 "Pity you wasn't in. Pity to be out when you've got 
 capital floating about." 
 
 Mr. Starkie, like many men in power, prided himself 
 upon his wit and had some reason to : for those in contact 
 with him rarely failed to laugh at his jokes. This man 
 did not. Mr. Starkie noticed it with disfavour. 
 
 He took up his inquisition. 
 
 "Are you married?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "How many in family?" 
 
 "Three. Self, wife, and child." 
 
 "What's your rent?" 
 
 "Twelve-and-six." 
 
 The other opened his eyes. 
 
 "Where d'you live? ParkLyne?" 
 
 "Archery Row." 
 
 Mr. Starkie turned up a ledger and again checked the 
 answer. 
 
264 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Are you behind?" 
 
 "Two or three pound." 
 
 "They've let you run on, then?" 
 
 "We've lived there ever since we was married." 
 
 "Any lodgers?" 
 
 "Not since that one." 
 
 "You've got the whole house to yourself — the three of 
 you?" 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 The Relieving Officer leaned back again. 
 
 "But if you can afford to pay that rent and live by 
 yourselves in a house with five or six rooms in it, you don't 
 want relief, Hankey." 
 
 Teddy said nothing. 
 
 "There's only three of you. You could do very well in 
 a single room you could get for 3s. a week — instead o' 
 livin' in a large house with a couple of rooms apiece like 
 Mr. Pierpont Morgan." 
 
 Mr. Starkie put on his hat and rose. 
 
 Teddy trembled and restrained himself. 
 
 "I don't want to move just now. My wife's expectin' 
 trouble." 
 
 "Who looks after her?" 
 
 "Doctor English." 
 
 Again the other stiffened. 
 
 "But if you can afford to have Doctor English to looV 
 after your wife you don't want relief from the rates." 
 
THE RELIEVING OFFICER 265 
 
 Again Teddy was silent. He stood like a pale shadow 
 against the door. Something pitiful about him seemed 
 to strike the other. 
 
 "How did you come out of work?'* he asked more 
 kindly. 
 
 "Had to give up." 
 
 The other eyed him. 
 
 "You don't look very strong. Anything up?" 
 
 "Keep on coughin\" 
 
 "Got a club?" 
 
 "Yes. Sick club at the works." 
 
 "Been on it?" 
 
 "Yes: I'm out now." 
 
 "What d'you have for dinner?" 
 
 "Potato." 
 
 Mr. Starkie put on his coat. 
 
 "I'll look round to-morrow." 
 
 "Can I 'ave something to go on with? There's no coal 
 nor food." 
 
 "I'll come round early to-morrow. You must get a 
 bit from a neighbour for the night." 
 
 Teddy sauntered toward the door with a touch of the 
 old swagger. 
 
 "What! Got to ask the Guardians or something?" he 
 said. 
 
 "I 'ave to do nothing of the sort," replied the other 
 harshly. 
 
266 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Next day Mr. Starkie marched down Archery Row and 
 stopped at No. 23. 
 
 All the neighbours were aware of it and watched. 
 
 Loo came to the door. She felt her neighbours' eyes. 
 
 "Will you come in, sir?" she said. 
 
 Mr. Starkie liked her better than her husband. 
 
 He entered with his hat on. It was little touches such 
 as these that made the poor of Mudsey loathe him and 
 Doctor English yearn to kick him. 
 
 He glanced round the parlour. 
 
 "You look a bit bare," he said. 
 
 Loo's mouth began to wriggle in a way very familiar to 
 the Relieving Officer. 
 
 "It wasn't like that once," she said. 
 
 He advanced into the kitchen. 
 
 "What are all those bottles?" 
 
 "My husband's lung-tonic." 
 
 She handed him one. He read the label, well-known 
 to him. 
 
 "He doesn't look very strong," he said. 
 
 "No, sir. It's his cough. Keeps on. Weakens him 
 so." She broke down and wept. 
 
 He made a note. 
 
 "Well, I shall have to ask the Medical Officer to step 
 round and have a look at him." He glanced at her figure. 
 "You look as if you want a bit of attention yourself, Mrs. 
 Hankey," he said gently. 
 
THE RELIEVING OFFICER 267 
 
 "Yes, sir," she answered simply. "I'm due now." 
 
 Again he made a note. 
 
 Then he gave her an order for groceries and coal. 
 
 "This will tide you over for a day or two," he said. 
 "We must see what can be done," he added not unkindly. 
 
 He dropped in at the dispensary of the Poor Law Medi- 
 cal Officer on his way home. 
 
 "And it's my belief, if I may venture an opinion," he 
 said, "that he is far gone in consumption, and never will 
 do another day's work, and that therefore out-relief is 
 vain." 
 
 Next day Doctor Plum, the Poor Law Medical Officer, 
 went round and examined Teddy. 
 
 "You'd best come in," he said briefly, folding up his 
 stethoscope. 
 
 Teddy breathed white. 
 'The Workhouse?" 
 
 "Yes; the infirmary. You'll be best there. You're 
 doing no good here — to yourself or your wife and child." 
 
 Doctor Plum was a brisk and busy man, trying to run 
 a private practice to supplement the mean salary the 
 State paid him for his services, and he had not time to be 
 courteous or considerate. 
 
 Teddy followed him to the door and there almost ran 
 into the arms of Doctor English, who wore a black tie 
 and was dressed in dark gray. 
 
268 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The doctor entered, and saw the other white and quiver- 
 ing. 
 
 "What is it, Ted?" he asked. 
 
 "They want to put me away, sir." 
 
 He was trembling from head to foot. 
 
 "Where?" 
 
 "In there." 
 
 "Workhouse?" 
 
 Teddy nodded. 
 
 The doctor paused and blinked. 
 
 "I'll see what can be done," he said, and went out. 
 
 That evening Mr. Starkie met Doctor Plum, the Poor 
 Law Medical Officer, and mentioned the case of Hankey. 
 
 "Seems he's one of English's pets," he said, with an 
 ugly sneer. "So he's got to go before the Board. Can't 
 be treated same as anybody else, English's pets can't. 
 Special preferential treatment for them. And he goes 
 about saying I've got my favourites." 
 
 Doctor Plum, a bald-headed young man, who derived 
 considerable amusement from the unending conflict be- 
 tween the two men, grinned. 
 
 "He can't do much," he said. "The man must come 
 in." 
 
 "Of course he must," said Mr. Starkie. "And best 
 place for him too." 
 
XXIX 
 THE BOARD OF GUARDIANS 
 
 The Mudsey Board of Guardians was sitting. 
 
 They were solid men, in the main honest, on the whole 
 just, unquestionably kind, and comfortable in their 
 middle-class security, these citizens whose sordid if nec- 
 essary task it was to preside over the scrap-heap on which 
 Mudsey dumped its waste. 
 
 The chairman, a clergyman, was an able administrator, 
 and a most efficient man of business. He had married 
 money, had no cure of souls, and was the prop of Con- 
 servatism in his constituency. Keen, clear-headed, some- 
 what hard, he was a vice-president of the Property Defence 
 League, an active supporter of the Anti-Socialist Union, 
 and a whole-hearted believer in the Poor Law, which he 
 administered admirably. 
 
 For him Doctor English was a doctrinaire and dreamer. 
 He pitied rather than disliked him, defining him as a good 
 man ruined by fatty degeneration of the heart. 
 
 Miss English admired him; Mr. Starkie believed in him 
 profoundly. 
 
270 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Mr. Thome's all right," he would say with a shrewd 
 nod. "No English about him." 
 
 To-day there was a full Board meeting, with Mr. Starkie 
 and Doctor Plum in attendance. 
 
 When Teddy Hankey's case came up for consideration 
 Mr. Starkie outlined it at length, while Doctor English 
 sat sombre and silent, hearkening. 
 
 There appeared to be no doubt of the genuineness of the 
 case, said Mr. Starkie. The Hankeys seemed thoroughly 
 respectable people, whose destitution was not brought on 
 by drink or sloth or crime, so far as he could ascertain. 
 
 They were some pounds behind with the rent; they were 
 hourly expecting the broker's man to put them out into 
 the street; and the home was bare to the boards. 
 
 "Where do they live?" asked the chairman. 
 
 "Archery Row." 
 
 "What rent?" 
 
 " Twelve-and-six a week." 
 
 The chairman stared. 
 
 " Twelve-and-six a week ! " he said. " No wonder they're 
 destitute." 
 
 "They've lived there since they were married," inter- 
 posed Doctor English. 
 
 "Have they the whole house to themselves?" 
 
 "The company won't let them underlet," said the 
 doctor. 
 
THE BOARD OF GUARDIANS 271 
 
 "Don't they take in a lodger?" 
 
 "They did," replied the doctor, "and were unfortunate." 
 
 Mr. Starkie told the story of the stolen money with 
 some wit. 
 
 Some one tittered. 
 
 "I see nothing to laugh at," remarked Doctor English, 
 sitting like a shadow among his colleagues. 
 
 " Go on," said the chairman. " How many in family? " 
 
 "There's one child, and another on the way; and the 
 man is far gone in consumption." 
 
 On this latter point Doctor Plum gave evidence. 
 
 "Is he incurable?" asked the chairman. 
 
 "Quite," replied the Poor Law Medical Officer firmly. 
 "Both lungs nearly gone." 
 
 "No sanatorium would take him then?" said the chair- 
 man. 
 
 Doctor Plum shook his head. 
 
 "No chance now," he said. 
 
 "How long is he likely to live?" 
 
 The other shrugged. 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 "It seems there's nothing for it but the infirmary,** 
 said the chairman, looking round. 
 
 "Nothing," remarked Doctor Plum. 
 
 "He'll get looked after there," said Mr. Starkie. 
 
 There was a silence. Here and there a man raised a 
 stealthy lid and shot an eye at Doctor English. 
 
272 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 At last he spoke. 
 
 "It seems a bit hard to take a respectable workingman 
 from his home at the last," he said. "A man — a family 
 man — likes to die amid his own." 
 
 The Guardians' eyes were down. They felt guilty: 
 they did not know why, 
 
 "What would you suggest?" asked the chairman at 
 length. 
 
 There was a silence. 
 
 "Who's to give him the nursing and all the medical 
 attendance he needs if he stops outside?" asked Doctor 
 Plum at length. "I can't." 
 
 "And his wife can't," said Mr. Starkie harshly, looking 
 round for support and sympathy. "She needs nursing 
 herself." 
 
 "And there's the child," chimed in a lady-guardian. 
 
 "The child sleeps in another room," said Doctor Eng- 
 lish. 
 
 "Yes," said Mr. Starkie. "No overcrowding there. 
 They've the whole house to themselves and the rate- 
 payers are to pay for it, I understand." 
 
 Doctor English growled in his beard. 
 
 "And there's the community," chimed in a Noncon- 
 formist tradesman, who had his own reasons for wishing 
 to spite the doctor. "He's spreading infection all the 
 time he's about; transmitting his tynte; sowing disease." 
 
 "Of course he is," said Mr. Starkie. 
 
THE BOARD OF GUARDIANS 273 
 
 "We don't need Mr. Starkie to tell us that," snapped 
 Doctor English. He turned to the chairman: "It seems 
 rather a special case, don't you think?" 
 
 "All Doctor English's cases are rather special ones," 
 muttered Mr. Starkie. " I don't see myself why Doctor 
 English's protegees should receive different treatment at 
 the 'ands of the Board to anybody else. The amount of 
 bad blood it makes in my district — you wouldn't believe." 
 
 "I'm not asking for special treatment," retorted Doctor 
 English savagely. "I'm asking for justice." 
 
 The other Guardians sat round with downcast eyes. 
 
 A meeting rarely passed without some such clash be- 
 tween the two men. 
 
 "What about the wife and child?" asked the lady- 
 guardian at length, impinging on the painful silence. 
 
 "I understand she's about to have a baby," said the 
 chairman. 
 
 "That is so," said Mr. Starkie. 
 
 "Then she'd best come in too," said the chairman. 
 
 "Much best," muttered Mr. Starkie. 
 
 Doctor English was gray and grim after his outburst. 
 
 "Then the whole of a deserving family would be under 
 the Workhouse roof," he said. 
 
 " Can you make any better suggestion yourself, Doctor 
 English?" said the chairman quietly. 
 
 The big doctor did five-finger exercises on the table and 
 was dumb. 
 
274 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "I don't see how we can keep the home together under 
 the circumstances," continued the chairman at length. 
 "Here's a man dying of phthisis; a woman about to have a 
 baby in a destitute home; pounds of rent owing — and 
 nothing coming in. We can only do our best with the 
 very inadequate means at our disposal. It's a hard case, 
 I admit." 
 
 "Plenty of 'em," muttered Doctor English, drumming 
 away. 
 
 The chairman looked about him. 
 
 "Has any one any practical suggestions to make?" he 
 asked. 
 
 "Yes," said Doctor English dully. "If the man '11 go 
 into the infirmary, I'll see to his wife and child." 
 
 "Very well," said the chairman. "That's very good of 
 you. If you'll see her through her trouble, we'll allow 
 her 15s. a week. And the man must come into the in- 
 firmary. Are we all agreed?" 
 
 He collected eyes. 
 
 Mr. Starkie rose. 
 
 "Hankey's outside, sir," he said. 
 
 "Show him in," said the chairman. "We'll have a 
 word with him." 
 
XXX 
 
 BEFORE THE BOARD 
 
 Teddy marched defiantly up the steps of the Work- 
 house. 
 
 His collar was turned up as though to defend himself, 
 and his cap hung over his eyes. 
 
 A blear-eyed man in corduroy shouted at him from an 
 office. 
 
 Teddy swung round. 
 
 "Who ye shoutin' at?" he snarled. 
 
 Mr. Starkie came down the stairs. 
 
 "That's all right, Hankey," he said. "This way," and 
 opened a door into the Board-room. 
 
 "Turn your collar down/' he whispered. 
 
 Teddy marched into the room, unheeding. 
 
 He was not sullen, he was not ashamed: he was still and 
 steel-like. 
 
 An array of middle-aged and middle-class citizens, 
 plump, easy and secure, were gathered round a table, one 
 woman in the midst of them. They sat massively in their 
 chairs with downcast eyes, ashamed, it almost seemed, of 
 their solidity. 
 
 275 
 
276 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The man was down, the man was dying, and they 
 were all sorry. 
 
 Teddy stood at the foot of the table phantom- 
 wise. 
 
 His eyes were down and he was breathing short; but 
 that still, steel-like air hung about him. 
 
 The chairman asked him a question or two for the sake 
 of courtesy, and then said: 
 
 "Well, Hankey, we've considered your case. And we 
 think on the whole you'd better come into the infirmary. 
 You want a bit of nursing just now. They'll look after 
 you well there and patch you up." 
 
 Teddy squeezed his wet hands. 
 
 "If I come in here, I'll never get work again," he said 
 in subdued voice. "They'll mark me down." 
 
 The chairman appealed to Mr. Starkie. 
 
 "Is that so?" 
 
 The Relieving Officer admitted that it would be a 
 handicap. 
 
 Doctor Plum wrote on a piece of paper: 
 
 "He'll never need work again," 
 
 and passed it round. 
 
 The chairman glanced at it and nodded. 
 
 "We think you'd better come in all the same — Just 
 for the present," he said kindly. "You want a bit of 
 looking after — good food and rest and that — I can see. 
 
BEFORE THE BOARD 277 
 
 You've had a bad time. They'll make you very comfort- 
 able in here." 
 
 The flame of a man at the foot of the table flared up. 
 
 "And what about my 'ome, sir?" 
 
 "We want you to make your home here for the 
 present." 
 
 "And my wife and child?" 
 
 "If you'll come in, we're prepared to see to your wife 
 and child." 
 
 Teddy set his lips. He was more steel-like than ever 
 
 "If I come in, they'll come in too," he said. 
 
 Doctor English for the first time raised his eyes. 
 
 "Surely, Hankey, you don't want your child born in 
 the Workhouse?" he said. 
 
 "If I come in," said Teddy stubbornly, "they're best 
 in too. Then I'll know where they are." 
 
 There was a murmur among the Guardians. 
 
 Out of it emerged Mr. Starkie's voice: 
 
 "Well, it's the best way out of it." 
 
 The doctor growled round on him. Then the chair- 
 man spoke again. 
 
 "Your wife and child can be admitted too, if you wish 
 it," he said. 
 
 "They'll be separated, I warn you," said Doctor Eng- 
 lish. "Meg will go the Workhouse, and your wife to the 
 infirmary — the women's ward " 
 
 Teddy stood white as ice and as stiff. 
 
278 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 " If I come in, they'll come in too," he said. " Then I'll 
 know where they are." 
 
 "Very well," said the chairman reluctantly. "Mr. 
 Starkie will make you out an order for admittance." 
 
 There was a silence. 
 
 Doctor English sat back, and his eyes were shut. 
 
 Out of the stillness there came in upon his ear the voice 
 of his cockney-friend, thin and far away. 
 
 "Beg pardon. There's one thing I'd like to know." 
 The voice paused. "What are I being punished for?" 
 
 The chairman grunted. 
 
 "You're not being punished at all." 
 
 The man at the foot of the table shifted on his feet, and 
 wrung his cap. 
 
 " Beg pardon. If I go in there, will I have my liberty? " 
 came the tremulous voice, so obviously short of breath. 
 "Can I come and go as I like?" 
 
 Doctor Plum interposed. 
 
 "You won't want to come and go. You'll be where 
 you ought to have been some time ago — in bed and 
 properly nursed," he said cheerfully. "It's just a hos- 
 pital." 
 
 The condemned man looked at him hollow-eyed and 
 accusing. 
 
 "Do you lose your vote in a hospital?" he asked. He 
 had the point from Swiney. 
 
 There was no answer. 
 
BEFORE THE BOARD 279 
 
 In the silence Doctor English could hear the other's 
 short, uncertain breathing. 
 
 One Guardian muttered to another that the man was a 
 bit of a lawyer. His colleague nodded. 
 
 Then Mr. Starkie spoke. 
 
 "Come, Hankey! It's hardly for you to cross-question 
 the Board," he said. 
 
 Doctor English opened his eyes. 
 
 "Are you chairman?" he growled. 
 
 Teddy coughed faintly. He stood at the foot of the 
 table, transparent as a flame, his white face uplifted, and 
 Lands twitching. 
 
 "Ain't it bad enough to have this trouble on me without 
 that on top?" came his thin voice. "Packed off in there 
 along of all sorts with the pauper tynte on me." He was 
 a dingy white flecked with crimson. "I'll ask Doctor 
 English to say a word for me," he ended. 
 
 The big doctor was dumb. For long he sat with down- 
 cast eyes. 
 
 "I think you'd better come in, Hankey," he said at last. 
 
 Teddy turned the colour of a sword. 
 
 "Thank you, Doctor English," he cried with a 
 trembling bow. "You're a good friend when a chap's 
 down." 
 
 He swung about and marched sprightly to the door. A 
 new life possessed him, the life that is Hate, laughing and 
 terrible. 
 
280 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He swaggered down the steps into the street. 
 
 A cripple who had sat for years at the window 
 opposite watching the Workhouse door which would 
 some day open to receive himself grinned sympathet- 
 ically. 
 
 " He's got round 'em, I'll lay," he muttered. " They've 
 give him good relief." 
 
 Teddy marched down the street. There was a light 
 in his eye, and he looked ten years younger, riding high 
 on the white wave that swept through him. 
 
 An old mate across the street greeted him cheerily. 
 
 "Why, Ted, you look twice the man!" he called. 
 
 "I'm right enough," answered Teddy, and swaggered 
 recklessly on, whistling. 
 
 Mr. Starkie caught him up and dismounted from his 
 bicycle. 
 
 "Sorry you went away like that, Hankey," he said. 
 "You can have an order for the infirmary whenever you 
 like." 
 
 "Thank you, old cock! thank you!" cried Teddy. 
 
 The Relieving Officer mounted afresh. 
 
 "And the Board requested me to tell your wife that 
 there'll be no further orders for groceries and coal until 
 you come in." 
 
 He rode on. 
 
 "You re a gentleman!" cried Teddy after him. 
 " That's what Mr. Starkie is. Ain't he? " 
 
BEFORE THE BOARD 281 
 
 He was whistling still as he entered home. 
 
 Loo met him, anxious-eyed. 
 
 "What they offer you, Ted?" she asked. 
 
 "The Bastille!" he said, and broke into terrible 
 
 laughter. "You and me and Meg and all." 
 
XXXI 
 THE BLOW 
 
 Loo did not weep. 
 
 She was too dull, too dead. 
 
 Quietly she trailed upstairs. 
 
 The rounded outlines of her figure showed clear be- 
 neath the dress that clung close as a mist about her body. 
 
 The Relieving Officer's supplies had run out and that 
 afternoon she had pawned her underclothes, and laid 
 out the proceeds on the necessaries of life. Twopence 
 had gone for coal — Loo was buying coal now as her sisters 
 at the other end of the town bought their tea, i. e. 9 by the 
 pound; two pence in potatoes, which were cheaper than 
 bread; a few pence more in tea, pepper and salt, wood and 
 the like; and two coppers lay upon the table. These the 
 mother meant to spend on milk for Meg. 
 
 Teddy swept them up and went out into the night, the 
 laughing devil still in his heart. 
 
 He was a capitalist once more. He had twopence in his 
 pocket for the first time for days. 
 
 The night was clear and beautiful. Up above all was 
 stillness and stars. In the shining darkness a slice of 
 
 282 
 
THE BLOW 283 
 
 moon blazed white, and a huge calm cloud-berg, radiant 
 in the moonlight, came over the tops of the low dark 
 houses. 
 
 Teddy stopped and stared. 
 
 The laughing devil died down in his heart. For a 
 moment a wave of peace surged through him, stilling his 
 storm. Then he hunted on with earthward eyes. He was 
 down once more amid dark houses, foul smells, and men 
 and women with eyes, millions of them, who gathered 
 about him in the dusk, gloating over his misery. 
 
 They didn't care; nor did he. 
 
 Ha! ha! 
 
 At the end of the street where Archery Row ran into the 
 busy thoroughfare along which trams glided with clang- 
 ing bells and men and women bustled and loafed in the 
 lamplight, the Brighton Arms flared meretriciously. 
 
 As Teddy passed out of the quiet backwater into the 
 hum of the main stream the lights drew him. They were 
 warm, welcoming. Within all was bright, cheery, clean. 
 
 For the first time for years he turned in. 
 
 Swiney stood at the four-ale bar with a big cigar and 
 a foaming tankard, and greeted the other affectionately. 
 
 Leather had been looking up of late in Mudsey: Ma- 
 pleton's was more thriving: Swiney now a leading hand 
 himself. Moreover, Syndicalism had emerged of a sud- 
 den out of the darkness into the firmament of world- 
 politics; and Swiney rejoiced. 
 
284 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "'Ellow, Ted! you're quite a stranger!" he cried, and 
 offered him a drink. 
 
 Teddy refused with a ghost of the old swagger, ordering 
 a lemon and a dash, and chucking his twopence down 
 upon the bar. 
 
 "And how's the State serving you now?" asked Swiney. 
 
 "Why, as you might expect,", replied the other, drinking. 
 
 And as he drank Swiney talked — the old malignant 
 talk. 
 
 On the previous evening at the Mudsey Radical Club 
 he had been listening to a speaker of the National Service 
 League. The room had been hung with mottoes and 
 quotations from the speeches of statesmen urging on all 
 men the paramount duty of serving their country. 
 
 "'Fight for your country !' say they. 'Let them fight 
 for a country that's got one,' I answers. Country! 
 What's the country do for you and me?" The door on 
 the street was wide. Through it they could see a police- 
 man standing in the light of a street-lamp outside. 
 Swiney pointed him out. "Puts him there to bludgeon 
 you if you stand out for your rights." 
 
 "That's it," said Teddy, drinking. "Bleed you dry, 
 and then trample on you. That's Patriotism, that is. 
 That's Imperialism." 
 
 "Now you've got it, my boy," said Swiney approvingly, 
 and stood the other treat. "That's God's truth. We're 
 to defend the country they own. And the country's to 
 
THE BLOW 285 
 
 do nothing for us in return — only put him there to run 
 us in." 
 
 For some time they hobnobbed together thus, Teddy 
 drinking gin at his friend's expense, and imbibing from his 
 lips a deadlier poison. 
 
 At last he rose and went out, his head singing and heart 
 embittered. 
 
 Outside he came upon the policeman, who loomed be- 
 fore him big and black as a thunder-cloud. 
 
 Suddenly the laughing devil spurted up in Teddy's 
 heart. A squall of rage swept through him. 
 
 "You're one on 'em!" he cried, and plunged into the 
 black cloud. 
 
 "Hullo! Hullo! What's this?" came a burly voice 
 out of a cloud, which forthwith enveloped him. 
 
 As he felt it close about him, Teddy struggled, kicked, 
 screamed, bit, swore. All the long-dammed bitterness 
 of his heart came spouting out of him. 
 
 Men and women rushed from all sides to see, eddying 
 about the struggling two, and encouraging Teddy with 
 jeers and cheers. 
 
 They thought it funny — this revolt of one man against 
 millions. 
 
 "Hit a chap yer own size, guv'nor!" 
 
 "Two to one on the little 'un!" 
 
 "Nah then the copper! Nah then Fat Chops!" 
 
 The policeman, a big pink man, shook his antagonist as 
 
286 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 a nurse may shake a naughty child, engulfed him, smoth- 
 ered him, and finally marched him off, a drowned rat of a 
 man, dishevelled, spluttering, awry. 
 
 Swiney, who had watched the struggle as a disin- 
 terested spectator from the steps of the public-house, saw 
 him led off amid a trailing rabble. 
 
 "They got you, Ted," he said; and picked his teeth 
 resignedly. 
 
 At the police-station they lodged the prisoner in a cell. 
 
 "What's the trouble?" asked the man with the charge 
 sheet. 
 
 " Assault," said the big policeman, puffing still. " Came 
 out of the Brighton Arms and went for me blind without 
 a word, the — little bounder!" 
 
 The other grinned. 
 
 "I daresay he didn't hurt you much, Jumbo," he 
 said. 
 
 The big man's dignity was not so wounded but that he 
 could see the joke. 
 
 "Kicked about a treat, I can tell you," he said, smooth- 
 ing himself. "I 'ad to mesmerize him. Call me Fat 
 Chops too! And swear! Wouldn't believe a little chap 
 like that could hold so many oaths " 
 
 Teddy sat with closed eyes and sweated and coughed 
 in a little bare cell. 
 
THE BLOW 287 
 
 He was too weak to revel; and the laughing devil had 
 died out of his heart. 
 
 When he came to himself, he asked to see Doctor 
 English. 
 
 The police telephoned to the doctor and reported that 
 he had been called away, but he should be given the 
 message upon his return. 
 
 Teddy waited all night, his eyes on the crack of the 
 door. 
 
 Doctor English did not come. 
 
 In the morning a policeman asked him if they should 
 telephone through again. 
 
 "No, thank you," said Teddy, white as steel. 
 
 An hour later he stood a prisoner in the dock between 
 two policemen. 
 
 A bored man in a black coat sat in a red-backed chair 
 on a dais and listened. 
 
 The big pink policeman gave his evidence profes- 
 sionally. 
 
 He had been on duty outside the Brighton Arms about 
 seven last night, and he could see the prisoner drinking 
 with his friends within. They all appeared excited and 
 were talking Socialism — down with the King and the 
 country, so far as he could hear. 
 
 "It's a lie!" said Teddy. 
 
 "Silence!" snapped the magistrate. 
 
288 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Teddy laughed. 
 
 Half-an-hour later, continued Fat Chops, the prisoner, 
 as he came out of the public-house, deliberately assaulted 
 him, shouting: 
 
 "You're one on 'em." 
 
 When arrested, the prisoner became very violent, 
 kicked, and bit like a mad thing, and used foul language. 
 
 A doctor then certified that he had examined the pris- 
 oner at the police-station. The prisoner had been drinking, 
 but was hardly drunk. The alcoholic swerve was absent. 
 
 The bored man with the heavy eyelids asked Teddy 
 what he had to say for himself. 
 
 "I slip up," said Teddy doggedly. 
 
 "You slipped up?" said the magistrate quietly. "It 
 was an accident?" 
 
 "That's it," said Teddy. 
 
 The bored man's eyes smiled. 
 
 "But how do you account for saying, 'You're one of 
 em j 
 
 Teddy swayed to and fro in the dock. Then he be- 
 came very still, and said deliberately: 
 
 "And you're another! And may God — the — lot of 
 you!" 
 
 The two men stared at each other. 
 
 Then the bored man said he would deal leniently with 
 the case as it was a first offence, and gave the prisoner six 
 weeks. 
 
THE BLOW 289 
 
 Teddy laughed, bowed ironically, and was marched off 
 between two policemen. 
 
 In his cell Doctor English was waiting him. 
 
 Teddy met him with that mocking bow of his, and re- 
 fused to shake hands. 
 
 "'Ope you're satisfied now, Doctor English!" he said. 
 
 The big doctor stood before him, breathing deep. 
 
 "I couldn't come before," he answered. "I was up all 
 night with your wife. She was brought to bed about ten. 
 It was a very bad case. I've had to see her off to the 
 hospital this morning. She should pull through now." 
 He added quietly: "The child was born dead." 
 
 There was a bitter yet triumphant flare in the other's 
 eyes as he said, 
 
 "That's better." 
 
part m 
 
 CRUSHED 
 
It behoved, said he, that Christ should suffer and rise from the dead and so 
 enter into his glory. — St. Thomas a Kemjris. 
 
XXXII 
 TEDDY RETURNS HOME 
 
 Teddy had not been in his prison-cell many hours before 
 a doctor came to see him. 
 
 He was old, Irish, and very kind. 
 
 "Poo' fellah!" he puffed and panted. "Poo' fellah!— 
 Pack him off to bed at once. Oughtn't to be here at all," 
 and he patted the other's thin, broad-arrowed shoulder. 
 
 They put him to bed in the infirmary of the prison, and 
 gave him everything there but the one thing he needed. 
 
 His body was past mending — the kind old doctor saw 
 that at once; and they could not tend his soul. That was 
 past healing too, save by the one medicine they were for- 
 bidden to administer in the gaol — the elixir of Love. 
 
 Teddy lay very still, speaking not at all. 
 
 He received two letters: one was from Loo, and one 
 from Doctor English. He opened neither. 
 
 The old doctor noticed it as he puffed and panted on his 
 rounds. 
 
 Something about this rotting wisp of humanity with the 
 bleak blue eyes for ever staring at the barred window 
 moved the old man's easily moved heart. 
 
 «9S 
 
294 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "How is it with ye, poo' fellah?" he puffed. 
 
 "I'm all right, thank ye," Teddy answered, that strange 
 steely light in his eyes. 
 
 "You should say Sir!" the warder reminded the sick 
 prisoner. 
 
 Teddy answered nothing, staring at the wall. 
 
 The warder bent over the bed. 
 
 "I say you should call the doctor Sir!" he continued, 
 louder and more harsh. 
 
 " Ah, let 'urn be," said the old doctor. " Poo' fellah ! he's 
 tired! — poo' fellah!" and puffed and panted on his way 
 
 Teddy did not serve his sentence out. 
 
 The kind old doctor saw to that. 
 
 "What's the good of keeping 'um in that state?" he 
 said. "Let 'um back to his home to die in peace like I'd 
 like to do meself, poo' fellah!" 
 
 So one dreary, dusty midday Teddy trailed down Arch- 
 ery Row toward the house that had been his home. 
 
 He did not know what he should find there, and did 
 not care. 
 
 It was instinct that led him back and a kind of curiosity. 
 
 In that house long ago had lived a woman and a child. 
 The woman had been his wife; and the child was his — 
 long ago; before it all happened. 
 
 Women standing in their doors watched him go, and 
 eyed each other meaningly across the street. 
 
TEDDY RETURNS HOME 295 
 
 "'Ankey's back," they whispered. "Don't he look 
 queer?" 
 
 One woman dared to say good-morning as he passed. 
 He did not answer her. 
 
 The door of his house was open. 
 
 He entered. The reek of destitution was all about him. 
 He stood in the bare parlour and sniffed. 
 
 "'Ome," he said. 
 
 A woman was moving in the kitchen at the back. 
 
 It was Loo. 
 
 She heard him and turned. 
 
 Then she came to him wistful and very pale. 
 
 "'Ello, Ted," she said, shy and sweet. 
 
 "'Ellow," he answered, and did not kiss her. "I'm 
 gaol-bird now. Funny — ain't it?" He sniggered. 
 
 She was about to swoop upon him, then something in 
 him stopped her — something dead. 
 
 He came slowly into the kitchen, and sniffed again. 
 
 "Stinks," he said. 
 
 She looked up at him. 
 
 "I was only out yesterday, Ted," she answered gently. 
 
 He stared at her with stagnant eyes. 
 
 " What? You been in there too? " 
 
 "In the hospital, Ted." 
 
 He brushed past her. 
 
 "Where's Meg?" he asked. 
 
 "School, dad." 
 
296 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He glanced up to the mantelpiece where the clock that 
 had been the Englishs' wedding present to them had 
 rested before it went to the pawnshop. 
 
 "Why ain't she back for dinner?" 
 
 "They're feeding her at the school." 
 
 Teddy sniffed. 
 
 " kind on 'em," he said. 
 
 He mouched on into the kitchen. 
 
 There was a wicker-chair, new to him, and other simple 
 comforts. 
 
 "Where's that chair come from?" he asked, rousing 
 suddenly. 
 
 Loo began nervously, 
 
 "Doctor English sent it round for me." 
 
 "English," he snorted; and kicked it savagely. 
 
 His word and deed terrified the woman. 
 
 "Oh, Ted!" she cried, and sat down and wept. 
 
 Teddy marched out and down the street and in a few 
 minutes was back wheeling a truck. 
 
 Without a word he took the chair and put it on the 
 truck. 
 
 "Anything else of English's in my 'ouse?" he asked. 
 
 The sobbing woman pointed him out one or two things 
 and added, 
 
 "There's the blankets on the bed!" 
 
 Breathing between set teeth, he piled them on the 
 truck. 
 
TEDDY RETURNS HOME 297 
 
 "Fair-weather friend," he said. "Fair-weather friend. 
 That's what English is. I don't wantto 'ave nothin' more 
 to do with him." 
 
 He wheeled the truck slowly away. 
 
 Loo stood in the door with straining eyes and watched 
 him go, his thin shoulders pulled down beneath the weight, 
 his crooked legs unsteady. 
 
 His obvious weakness touched her. 
 
 She ran and lent a hand to shove. 
 
 "Drop it!" he panted. 
 
 Sodden with woe, she retired into the house. 
 
 As he turned the corner the doctor wheeled up behind 
 him on his bicycle, and got off. 
 
 "Well, Ted," he said quietly. 
 
 "Well," said Ted, marching on. 
 
 "Bringing the things back?" 
 
 "Seems like it." 
 
 "Doesn't your wife want them?" 
 
 "She don't want nothin' o' your'n." 
 
 The doctor turned gray. He tramped along at the 
 other's side. Neither spoke. 
 
 "Haven't you got a word for me, Ted?" asked the 
 doctor at length. 
 
 "One," said Ted. "Good-bye." 
 
 The great doctor got on his bicycle. 
 
 "So long," he said quietly, and rode back to the house 
 from which the other came. 
 
298 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Loo's face was still wrung and streaming as he came in 
 to her. 
 
 "And after all your kindness, sir!" she sobbed. 
 
 "He's a bit bitter," answered the other gently. "And 
 I'm sure I don't wonder. He's had enough to make him. 
 It's only a passing phase. I'll pop round to Doctor Plum 
 and see what can be done." 
 
 He rode on to the Poor Law Medical Officer and told 
 him the story. 
 
 The young man shook a doubtful head. 
 
 " You know how I'm situated, English," he said. " The 
 fiat's gone forth. There's to be no out-relief till the man 
 comes in. He's doing no good to himself or anybody else 
 out here." 
 
 " And yet it seems a bit hard the wife and child should 
 suffer for his stubbornness," said the doctor. 
 
 The younger man shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "You're only prolonging the agony, seems to me," he 
 said. " The man should be isolated. However, I'll stretch 
 a point. I'll give her an order for medical extras. She's 
 only just out of hospital, you say? We can make that 
 an excuse." 
 
 "That's it," purred the doctor. 
 
 He rode round to Loo's with the order. 
 
 "Here's a gleam of light," he cried. "Medical extras 
 — beef-tea, eggs, and milk. Take it round to Mr. Starkie 
 now — and don't say I got it for you." 
 
TEDDY RETURNS HOME 299 
 
 Loo went. 
 
 Half-an-hour later she was round at Doctor English's. 
 
 Mr. Starkie had refused to grant the order. 
 
 " I can't do it, Mrs. Hankey," he had said. " The right 
 place for your husband is in the infirmary — for his sake 
 and your own." 
 
XXXIH 
 
 THE MAN WITH THE RAZOR 
 
 The soul of Teddy Hankey was going down in the deeps 
 of the ocean-city that moaned and muttered in league- 
 long desolation all about him. 
 
 He lay like a corpse with living eyes on a piece of sack- 
 ing filled with straw that served for mattress on the rusty 
 ruin of a bedstead projecting its gaunt framework on 
 every side. And over his phantom-body an old skirt of 
 Loo's, that was all the blanket the bed knew, was drawn. 
 
 Day and night he lay thus in shirt and trousers, looking 
 into the distance, always looking. 
 
 The flame was in his cheek, and the light in his eye. 
 
 He looked like a ghost on fire. 
 
 When Loo addressed him, he did not answer, and when 
 she brought Meg into the room he closed his eyes and 
 frowned. 
 
 On the second day Loo summoned her one friend — 
 Mrs. Baxter — from across the way. 
 
 "Seems as if he saw something," said the perturbed 
 woman. "And he don't speak. Queer-like." 
 
 The two women stood in the door and looked. Teddy 
 
 soo » 
 
THE MAN WITH THE RAZOR 301 
 
 lay in his gray shirt on the mattress of old brown sacking, 
 one hand behind his flaming head, and gazed into the 
 Future with seeing eyes. 
 
 Loo bent over him. 
 
 "'Ello, old man," she said rather loudly. "'Ow are 
 you?" 
 
 "I'm all right," he answered quietly. 
 
 The two women crept down the stairs. 
 
 "What d'ye make of him, Liz? " asked Loo, apron to her 
 lips, and tears streaming down her face. 
 
 The other shook a sympathetic head. 
 
 "He looks bright," she said, "burning bright. Like 
 he was on fire." 
 
 "So he is," said Loo; "burning away." 
 
 For three days he lay thus in bed, saying nothing. And 
 he grew always more hollow, more transparent. 
 
 In the darkness of the third night, when the great city 
 at last had gone to sleep about her, a sudden horror seized 
 Loo: the man at her side seemed so still. She rose and 
 lighting a match bent over him. 
 
 He lay just as in the day, his eyes wide and brilliant. 
 
 "Dad," she said. 
 
 He nodded; and she thought his eyes smiled at her. 
 
 The bitterness seemed fading out of him. 
 
 The woman in her felt it and kissed him. 
 
 "Go to sleep, old man," she said. 
 
 He shook a silent head. 
 
302 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 And when she woke next morning, he was still lying 
 there with the same wide and seeing eyes. 
 
 Swiney sent him a few cigarettes: he did not smoke 
 them. Doctor English dropped him a paper: he did not 
 read it. 
 
 "Don't you care about nothing, dad?" asked Loo. 
 
 He stared into the Future. 
 
 "You leave me alone," he said quietly. "I'm all 
 right." 
 
 All day he lay thus, the windows wide, and hearkened 
 to the huge city roaring and rumbling on its callous way; 
 and he ate nothing. 
 
 "Like a spirit," said Loo. "And looks like one." 
 
 A strange transformation was taking place within him. 
 He was becoming transfigured. A cold white light shone 
 through the darkness of his flesh. In his eyes there was a 
 strange, unearthly glitter. And he was quiet, so quiet. 
 It was as though he was gathering his forces for a 
 spring. 
 
 On the fourth morning he began to stir. 
 
 His eyes wandered round the room, seeking. 
 
 At length he asked, 
 
 "Where's Meg?" 
 
 "At school, dad," said Loo, bending over him, and 
 speaking rather loudly. She had a sense that he was 
 drawing away from her. "They're feeding her there." 
 
 A cloud darkened the sick man's face. 
 
THE MAN WITH THE RAZOR 303 
 
 "She don't want feedin'," he said. 
 
 Loo smiled. 
 
 "And how'll she live then, old man?" 
 
 The dying father wagged his head. 
 
 "Same as me," he muttered. 
 
 Later Loo put on her hat, and went out to look for 
 work. 
 
 When Mrs. Baxter came to Teddy at midday, he asked 
 her if she had seen Meg. 
 
 She answered no. 
 
 "Send her along when you see her," the sick man 
 croaked. "I got something for her." 
 
 That afternoon a young man knocked at the door. 
 
 He was in a straw hat and quietly dressed. His large 
 head was covered with thick soft woolly hair and there was 
 something about him of the awkwardness and innocence 
 of a puppy. 
 
 In his hand was a pocket-book and some case-papers. 
 
 There was no answer to his knock, and at last he turned 
 the handle and peeped in. 
 
 The room was squalid and very bare. There was little 
 furniture in it but a broken cube-sugar box, rubbish, orna- 
 ments, and a couple of flimsy curtains. And about the 
 house was the peculiar smell which the young man was 
 already beginning to associate with destitution. 
 
 In a dusky kitchen beyond a man was sitting on a 
 
304 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 broken-down chair under a gas-jet — the only thing that 
 seemed to live in the house. 
 
 He sat before the fireplace in which was no fire, and 
 shivered. Something that looked like an old skirt was 
 wrapped about his head and shoulders. His gray stock- 
 inged toes were on the fender; and his claw-like hand held 
 a razor and sharpened it caressingly. 
 
 "Is that Meg?" came a voice from under a cloud. "I 
 want you." 
 
 The young man coughed. 
 
 A burning skeleton, his red head skirt-wrapped, turned 
 hollow, blazing eyes upon him. 
 
 The young man was a rowing Blue; but there was 
 something about this death's head peeping out of a cloud 
 that appalled him. He was in the presence of something 
 he did not understand. 
 
 Then he took courage and cleared his throat. 
 
 "Good-morning," he said. "I'm a visitor from the 
 Charity Organization Society. I'm afraid you're having 
 a bad time. I thought perhaps I could help you." 
 
 The skeleton with the long thin neck and hollow, blazing 
 eyes, huddled in his skirt, shook a solemn head. 
 
 "I don't want no 'elp," he said, in a voice from another 
 world. "I'm past 'elp." 
 
 "Oh, come!" said the young man, feigning a cheerful- 
 ness he did not feel. "Never say die. What's the 
 matter." 
 
THE MAN WITH THE RAZOR 305 
 
 The skeleton eyed him solemnly. 
 
 " I'm dead," he said. " That's what's the matter." 
 
 "I'm sorry to hear that," replied the young man some- 
 what lamely. 
 
 "I'm dead," continued the other, and licked his with- 
 ered lips. "I'm going back." 
 
 "Where?" asked the young man, nervously. 
 
 The skeleton jerked toward the door. 
 
 "Outside," he whispered. "Too tight here altogether. 
 Too many of 'em. I'm squeezed" — he gasped — 
 "squeezed." He began to cough and choke and 
 splutter. 
 
 Outside in the street the young man made a note : 
 
 23 Archery Row. Maniac. Looked in last stages of consumption. 
 Home very bare. Case for lunacy authorities. 
 
 Farther down the street he met Mr. Starkie and re- 
 counted his interview. 
 
 "I know," replied the Relieving Officer quietly. "It's 
 a bad case. He won't face the infirmary. We've got to 
 make him. Must be a bit brutal sometimes." 
 
 "I never saw such a ghastly sight," said the young man. 
 "A skeleton sharpening a razor." 
 
 Mr. Starkie turned gray. 
 
 "Sharpening a razor!" he muttered swiftly. "Did you 
 take it from him?" 
 
306 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "No," said the young man. "It was no business of 
 mine." 
 
 Mr. Starkie walked on gravely. 
 
 "But you should have done so!" 
 
 "Well, you can go round and do it yourself," retorted 
 the young man. "It's only just down the street." 
 
XXXIV 
 THE OLD FRIEND 
 
 Loo's health was returning to her with a rush. 
 
 She was young; she was strong; and the weight and 
 trouble of the days before her baby had been born were 
 passing from her like a cloud. 
 
 Meg was being fed at school. The child was hourly 
 resuming her old self, good alike to see and feel and hear. 
 Miss English was returning home. Work was within her 
 grasp, and with it Salvation. 
 
 It was almost the old Loo who rushed into the house 
 that evening. 
 
 "I got work at Northweirs," she cried joyfully. 
 "Cheer, Ted!" — and stopped suddenly. 
 
 The sick man, huddling over the empty grate, had 
 slipped a razor into his pocket. 
 
 She saw it and flashed. 
 
 "Hand that here!" she ordered, taking command once 
 more. 
 
 He rolled up his eyes, resisting her. 
 
 It was a battle between the Spirit of Life and the Spirit 
 of Death, and the former conquered. 
 
 307 
 
308 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He surrendered the weapon. 
 
 Her victory won, she relaxed. 
 
 "What ye want with that, ye silly?" she scolded. 
 
 He said nothing, sitting beneath her, slight as a lad 
 and sullen. 
 
 She looked at him with eyes that were half angry, half 
 amused. He was a naughty boy. She was his mother 
 and his master, and by no means afraid of him. Physi- 
 cally and morally she was twice the man. 
 
 Then Meg entered. 
 
 Teddy turned his eyes on her. 
 
 " You're late, my maid," he said quietly. " I been look- 
 ing for you." 
 
 Loo packed the child off to bed at once. 
 
 Her father's eyes followed her little clambering figure 
 up the stairs. 
 
 There was no gas or light of fire in the kitchen; and the 
 man and woman sat over against each other in the dark- 
 ness throughout the evening. 
 
 Loo, after her long day's search for work, snoozed. 
 She woke to hear her husband moving in the child's room 
 overhead. 
 
 He had crept upstairs in his stockings while she 
 dozed. 
 
 She rushed up after him with panting heart. 
 
 The scarecrow figure of her husband stood, with a lighted 
 
THE OLD FRIEND 309 
 
 match in his hand, bending over the cot in which Meg 
 slept. 
 
 Then he bent and kissed his child. 
 
 A sudden revulsion overcame Loo. 
 
 She put her hand on his thin arm. 
 
 " Let the child be, old man," she said tenderly. " She's 
 tired." 
 
 He withdrew reluctantly. 
 
 "Yes," he said. "She wants a rest — same as me." 
 
 Next morning she brought him a bit of bread and drip- 
 pings as he lay. 
 
 Then she put on her hat. 
 
 "I'm off to work now, Ted," she said. "I daresay 
 Mrs. Baxter '11 bring you a mug of something hot at din- 
 ner. And I'll get you a nice kipper for tea." 
 
 Before she left the house she peeped in at him again. 
 
 He was up and groping about the room, searching as 
 one in a dream. 
 
 She watched him with a certain grim humour. 
 
 "No good lookin', old man," she said firmly. "That's 
 in my pocket." 
 
 He moved about the room. 
 
 "When'UMegbeback?" 
 
 "Not till evening." 
 
 Then she went out. 
 
 He followed her to the door. 
 
310 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 A little way down the street she turned and looked at 
 him. 
 
 He was gazing at her with wistful eyes. 
 
 She saw it and waved. 
 
 He lifted his little old face to hers like a child. 
 
 "What is it, old man?" she asked, tender as a lover. 
 
 "Give us a kiss, Loo," he gulped. 
 
 Swift as a bird she sped back and kissed him. 
 
 "Cheer, old man!" she cried. "We're through the 
 worst now." 
 
 He hung a moment on her neck. 
 
 "You ain't a-comin', Loo?" he muttered in her ear. 
 
 She held back from him. 
 
 "Where to, dad?" 
 
 The sound of a steamer hooting in the river hard by 
 smote his ear. 
 
 He held up a hushing finger, and listened, nodding. 
 
 "She's a-callin'," he said. 
 
 When she had vanished round the corner he lifted his 
 hollow face to the low gray sky. 
 
 It was the first time since the day he came out of prison 
 that he had felt the breath of heaven upon him. 
 
 Now he stood in the door in his shirt and trousers and 
 stockinged feet, a desolate wind-blown wisp of mortality, 
 gazing up into immensity, the great city rumbling all 
 around him. 
 
THE OLD FRIEND Sll 
 
 He seemed to be seeking something, and not finding it. 
 His eyes wandered hither and thither. There was no 
 green of tree, no rich brown of naked earth, no shine of 
 rushing water on which to rest them. Only the sky drift- 
 ing dully by overhead was there to testify that somewhere 
 far away the great natural things, elemental and eternal, 
 lived and moved and had their being. 
 
 Down the street a cage upon the wall caught his 
 eye. 
 
 He paddled toward it, walking gingerly on stockinged 
 feet, one hand against the wall, and stood beneath the 
 cage at gaze. 
 
 It held a thrush, black-eyed, speckle-breasted, and 
 beautiful. 
 
 Teddy eyed it. 
 
 "He's come back then," he said in that remote and 
 mystic vein of his. 
 
 The woman of the house came out to him. 
 
 " That's a new one," she said. " That's a thrush. The 
 lark's dead." 
 
 Teddy stood beneath with lifted face and eyes that 
 dreamed. 
 
 "He's come back to his cage," he said. "Can't keep 
 away, ye see, when he does get out," and added shrewdly, 
 "but he's had his 'oliday. It's new like to him again. 
 He ain't so tired." 
 
 The woman looked at him, and was afraid. 
 
312 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "There's the postman gone to your door, Mr. Hankey," 
 she said gently. 
 
 The scarecrow paddled back along the wall. 
 
 Within his door he found a blue envelope lying. He 
 opened it. It was from the Mudsey Artisans' Dwellings 
 Company, giving him a week's notice. 
 
 Teddy read it. 
 
 "Amen!" he said, unmoved. 
 
 Going to the street, he begged a match of a passerby, 
 and returning to his house, shut the door behind him. 
 
 Taking a cube sugar-box that had served as a chair he 
 broke it up, laid it in the fireplace, and set it alight. 
 
 His exertion had tired him, and a great craving of 
 hunger seized him. 
 
 He went to the cupboard. It was bare save for a little 
 casual crockery, and the old teapot with the broken spout 
 that had once chinked to gold. 
 
 On the sill of the kitchen-window was a row of empty 
 bottles of lung-tonic. 
 
 He broke one of them and licked the inside of it with 
 his tongue, and another and another. 
 
 His eyes wandered round the home that had been his 
 for years and was his no longer. 
 
 There were no tears in his eyes or heart. 
 
 He was past weeping, past pain. If there was suffering 
 in his face, there was beauty too. 
 
 He stoked the fire and crept upstairs on his hands and 
 
THE OLD FRIEND 313 
 
 feet. There was no one to see; and he could confess his 
 weakness to himself and to his Maker without fear. 
 
 Stripping the old skirt that was its only blanket off the 
 bed, he took the bolster and pillow, and lugging them 
 downstairs, piled them on the fire. In the parlour he tore 
 down the curtains and added them to the blaze. 
 
 Once again he climbed the stairs, panting and sweating 
 as he did so, and the smoke from the kitchen pursued him 
 and wreathed mistily about him. 
 
 There was nothing now in the bedroom but the old 
 sackcloth palliasse upon the gaunt bedstead, and in the 
 corner Loo's tin box in which she had kept her clothes. 
 
 He opened it. Within the hollow of it was a pair of 
 stockings and one small undergarment, new-washed and 
 pitifully alone. He took it up and gazed at it. Some- 
 thing seized him by the throat, and he began to tremble. 
 Then he sat down on the bed and gasped. Going to the 
 window he gazed out; but he could not see across the street. 
 
 Then he laid the garment on the palliasse, spread it 
 abroad delicately, smoothed it with tender hands, and 
 pulled down the blind. 
 
 In the dusk the garment lay on the bed as one crucified. 
 
 He bent over it and kissed it. 
 
 Then he went out quietly and tried the door of Meg's 
 room opposite. 
 
 It was locked. 
 
 Quietly he crept downstairs. 
 
314 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 There was a smother of smoke in the kitchen. Pillow, 
 bolster, skirt, and curtains were smouldering away in the 
 grate and on the floor. 
 
 He shut the back door and pulled down the blinds of 
 kitchen and parlour. 
 
 Then he made a clean sweep of everything below — 
 crockery, pictures, tea-leaves, broken chairs, ornaments 
 piled in a refuse-heap upon the kitchen floor alongside 
 the smouldering bedding. 
 
 Loo's kitchen, once bright with shining pans and fair 
 china, looked like an ash-pit and smelt like a heap of gar- 
 bage upon fire. 
 
 Teddy retreated into the parlour. 
 
 It was now bare as earth. The solitary article left on 
 its walls was a cheap coloured print of the Good Shepherd. 
 
 Teddy stood before it, staring. In the dusk he could 
 see the golden halo surrounding the figure's head. 
 
 "I'll leave you," he muttered. "You're a friend." 
 
 Then he went into the kitchen and sat coughing in a 
 shroud of smoke over the smouldering ruins of his home. 
 
 The hours passed; and again he crept to the door of his 
 house. 
 
 Church-bells were ringing, and a group of young men 
 from the University Mission near by passed laughing. 
 He recognized them by their clothes and bearing. They 
 had the size and strength of the class from whom physical 
 
THE OLD FRIEND 315 
 
 exertion is not demanded. And above all they were 
 fuU-fed. 
 
 "Goin* to pray to Jesus?" he asked quietly as they 
 passed him. 
 
 One of them, fresh-faced and fair, stopped. 
 
 "Yes; and I wish you were too, old chap," he said 
 heartily. 
 
 Teddy bent a mild and ghastly eye upon him. 
 
 * Perhaps I am," he said. 
 
 The young man changed colour and passed on. 
 
 "Did you see that chap's face?" he muttered to his 
 friends, who looked behind them. 
 
 It was drawing into evening now, and the low gray sky 
 was suffused with a tint of pearls and roses. 
 
 The tender light fell on the man in the door and blessed 
 him as he stared. 
 
 Teddy lifted his face from the solid earth to the nebu- 
 lous heavens. 
 
 The light ebbed and flowed in his eyes. When it 
 ebbed they were left pale and dull; when it flowed they 
 glittered strangely. 
 
 He stood in his door, a ragged little scarecrow of a man, 
 the wisps of smoke eddying about him, munching his lips, 
 and making up his soul. 
 
 Mrs. Baxter was nursing her baby in the door opposite. 
 
 "You ain't seen our Meg?" he called across to her 
 huskily. 
 
316 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "There she is up the street, Mr. Hankey. See — 
 playing with the children." 
 
 He turned his hollow, blazing eyes the way she pointed. 
 Meg was playing the game the children call ping-pong, 
 hopping from one square to another, her fair hair dancing, 
 and face and eyes alive with joy. 
 
 There was little sunlight; but Teddy put his hand to his 
 brow and called feebly. 
 
 Mrs. Baxter uplifted her strong young voice to aid him. 
 
 " Meg ! " she called. " Daddy wants you to come in." 
 
 The child came skipping. 
 
 Her father eyed her wistfully. 
 
 "'Ave you 'ad enough, Meg?" he asked gravely. , 
 
 "She'd like to be out in the sun a bit yet, I daresay," 
 said Mrs. Baxter. "It's early to go in." 
 
 "Time enough," said Teddy solemnly. "Better sooner 
 than later." 
 
 "Just when the sun's coming out," continued Mrs. 
 Baxter, standing in a blaze of it. 
 
 "I can't see no sun," said Teddy, lifting his face like a 
 blind man to the blaze and feeling for it with spectral 
 claws. "There's sun somewhere. 'Tain't here, though." 
 He turned to the child. " 'Alf a mo, lovey. I must just 
 finish up inside. Then I'll be ready." 
 
 He reentered his house. 
 
 In the kitchen the refuse-heap still smouldered and 
 stank. 
 
THE OLD FRIEND 317 
 
 On the floor the blue notice to quit floated in the smoke. 
 
 He picked it up and put it on the table — the one 
 article of furniture that had been too solid to break up and 
 burn. 
 
 On it he stood the broken-spouted teapot that had held 
 the gold which was to have bridged for him the Abyss into 
 which he had now fallen. 
 
 A sudden curiosity seized him. He lifted the lid. The 
 old teapot was full to the brim of pawn-tickets. 
 
 Behind the teapot he ranged the bottles of lung-tonic 
 in a row. 
 
 Then from the smouldering ash-heap on the floor he 
 drew a charred piece of wood. 
 
 On the bare parlour wall he drew a rough arrow-head 
 that pointed to the river and scrawled, 
 
 Dkar Loo: 
 This way when you've had enough. Meg and me are going on. 
 
 Your loving husband, 
 
 Ted. 
 
 Then he went out into the street, closing the door be- 
 hind him. 
 
 A battered billycock was on his head. 
 
 "Come along, lovey," he said tenderly. 
 
 The child took his extended hand, and the two started 
 down the street. 
 
 A strange figure he made, that dilapidated little man 
 padding gingerly along on his gray stockinged feet. 
 
318 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He was in his shirt and trousers. Stuck comically 
 upon his head was the battered billycock, and on his face 
 a strange dignity. 
 
 Men and women came to their doors to stare. 
 
 They sniggered until they saw his face, and then the 
 snigger died suddenly. 
 
 Teddy passed them gravely by. 
 
 Meg held his hand and danced at his side. 
 
 She thought it a huge joke. 
 
 "Funny daddy," she chuckled, skipping at his side 
 
 He looked down at her with austere tenderness. 
 
 "Are you my little gal?" he asked. 
 
 She laughed up at him and nodded. 
 
 "Comin' along, ain't you?" 
 
 Again she nodded. 
 
 He gripped her hand. 
 
 "Best so," he said. "There's no room here." 
 
 Once again he spoke. 
 
 "You like the river, Meg?" 
 
 "Yes, daddy." 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 "She's our friend. Mum said that; and she was right. 
 They can't hurt you there." 
 
 A little crowd of children began to patter after them 
 
 Teddy heard them and turned. 
 
 His look dispersed them. 
 
 There was no need of word or wave. 
 
THE OLD FRIEND 319 
 
 About the man there was a mild terror, a kind of maj- 
 esty that did not fail of its effect. 
 
 The pair turned into Mudsey Wall. 
 
 "Say good-bye, lovey," said Teddy. 
 
 The bewildered child looked up the street. 
 
 "There's mum!" she cried, hanging back. 
 
 "She'll follow," said Teddy, stiffening. "Come, 
 lovey!" and led down the Wall. 
 
 It was dark and narrow there as a grave, the ware- 
 houses high on either side. Here and there the river 
 gleamed through an archway on their left. Teddy peeped 
 at it. 
 
 " There she is ! " he cried, white as the water. He began 
 to kindle. A sudden fire spurted to his eye. 
 
 Meg hung upon her daddy's hand and whimpered. 
 
 Suddenly he bent, caught her up into his arms, and 
 staggered swiftly down the Wall. 
 
 The child felt herself pinioned and began to kick and 
 scream. 
 
 Her father clapped a hand over her mouth. Above the 
 thin fingers that pressed into her face and made white 
 splodges there, her frightened eyes peered at him. 
 
 "Best out of it, my little girl," he panted. "More 
 room there!" 
 
XXXV 
 DOCTOR ENGLISH LIES 
 
 Doctor English was walking down Farthing Alley, the 
 evening beautiful about him. 
 
 A few weeks since, his mother had died quietly in her 
 sleep as she had wished, " and no trouble to any one, my 
 dear." 
 
 He had been with her that last evening. The old lady 
 would not die until he came. And she had known him, 
 and rejoiced in him, this big-browed, mighty -boned son of 
 hers, gray now himself, whom she had born of her little 
 body some sixty years before. She had blessed him with 
 her eyes, loved him, laughed with him. For the last time 
 they had enjoyed together the old jokes, the old sweet 
 communion; and he had entered her room quietly a few 
 hours later to find her asleep for ever and smiling still, a 
 tear of joy bedewing her cheek, and the Dawn breaking 
 wan about her face. 
 
 And this holy sorrow, while it had deepened his own 
 deep heart, had established him in the sense of that other 
 Dawn, wan too and beautif jl, that was rushing with heal- 
 ing on its wings out of the East to bring light to the mil- 
 
DOCTOR ENGLISH LIES 321 
 
 lions who had sat through centuries in darkness and in 
 the shadow of death. 
 
 As he walked down the lane amidst familiar sights and 
 smells, seeing all things with larger, clearer, more loving 
 eyes, he realized as he had never realized before the miracle 
 that had been wrought in Mudsey in his thirty years of 
 warfare there. 
 
 And it was a moral and not a material change that he 
 had witnessed : something you could feel rather than see. 
 
 Mudsey was if anything poorer than when he first came 
 to live there. The leather trade was all but dead; the 
 waterside labour always more desultory and casual. The 
 houses were on the whole as mean and dirty now as then; 
 the courts and alleys almost as noisome to eyes and nose; 
 the men and women just about as shabby; the children 
 very little less barefoot and blotchy. 
 
 Yet the place was transfigured. An immense and 
 invisible change had come over the whole. And it was 
 clearly not a change of circumstance; it was a change of 
 heart. 
 
 In those far days Mudsey was brutal. You heard 
 about its courts and alleys horrible sounds by night; 
 and you saw strange and dreadful sights by day. Fights 
 between women were common, while men stood round and 
 cheered. That a girl in her early teens should be led 
 astray was simply a matter for laughter. And the 
 pounding to death of dogs and cats was by no means rare. 
 
322 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 In those days Mudsey was emerging from the Dark 
 Ages, as some mammoth emerges from a Slough of De- 
 spond, the slime and mud trickling down its old gray sides. 
 
 He walked on amid his memories. 
 
 There was hardly for him an alley or courtyard but 
 brought back to him some scene of those bad old days, 
 when Brute Force reigned everywhere, master crushing 
 man, man crushing woman, and woman too often child. 
 
 Out of that window in Robert's buildings a woman had 
 chucked a saucepan of boiling water at him. In Pansy 
 Alley he had found two men bricking a third to death in 
 the small hours of a Sunday morning. Here in Rosemary 
 Court Levi's gang had cornered him and left him thankful 
 for sinews hardened for years in the football field and on 
 the river. 
 
 All that now seems so far away. 
 
 There was plenty of misery still, but help was coming. 
 There was plenty of brutality still, but it was passing 
 away. The community no longer turned its back upon 
 the children who cried to it. Rather it reached out loving 
 if feeble hands in a thousand directions to seek and to save. 
 
 The scream of a woman, shrill and terrible, woke him 
 from his dreams. 
 
 Some distance down Mudsey Wall before him a swarm 
 of excited boys made a knot of blackness at an opening 
 
DOCTOR ENGLISH LIES 323 
 
 that led down to the river. Women were rushing down 
 the Wall toward them. 
 
 He took to his legs and ran. 
 
 A boy dived past him, yelling, 
 
 "Police!" 
 
 A white-faced woman looked round and saw him. 
 
 "He's drowning her!" she screamed. 
 
 The big doctor raced down the narrow Wall, flinging off 
 his coat and waistcoat and loosening his collar as he went. 
 
 More than once in the past had the old brown river 
 known his battling body as he snatched her prey out of her 
 swift, fierce clutch. 
 
 With the brutality that distinguished him upon occa- 
 sions he forced his way through the crowd of women and 
 children surging at the opening. Some of them clung to 
 him hysterically. One hid her face on his chest. 
 
 "Oh, doctor, dear!" she whimpered. 
 
 "Let go, you ass!" he shouted roughly, and shook her 
 off. 
 
 Stone steps led down to a narrow strip of beach. 
 
 He ran down them, through a straggling crowd, casting 
 off his shoes. 
 
 As he did so, he had a vision of the river racing by, a 
 passing barge with a figure on the stern of it shouting 
 vehemently, and one or two women wading clumsily out 
 into the swift stream, while others flapped and splashed 
 and screamed at the edge. 
 
324 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 A man was floundering in the water farther out; and 
 there was something underneath him that gasped and 
 wailed in tiny treble and struggled pitifully. 
 
 Then both disappeared beneath the water; and only the 
 man's back and braces showed like a tiny tide-sluiced 
 island a few yards from the shore. 
 
 The doctor waded into the cold water. 
 
 "Steady, Ted!" he said, calm and stern. 
 
 The floundering figure stood up, the water to his chest. 
 He looked absurd. His mouth was wide, his eyes blink- 
 ing. The red hair was plastered all about his skull, and 
 the water streaming from it; and he was panting hugely. 
 He had the stupid look of a man waked swiftly and as yet 
 not himself. 
 
 "'Ellow!" he gasped, and stared at the other through 
 glazed eyes across the few feet of swift intervening 
 water. 
 
 In his arms was the child with tight-screwed face and 
 open mouth spluttering painfully for breath and whimper- 
 ing between her gasps. 
 
 "Let me have her!" said the doctor, quiet and authori- 
 tative as at the bedside of a patient. 
 
 Teddy surrendered his burden without a word. The 
 doctor took the limp rag of a child in his arms and waded 
 back to the shore. 
 
 Meg gasped, coughed, whimpered, made strange, wry 
 faces. 
 
DOCTOR ENGLISH LIES 325 
 
 The doctor smiled down at her, as he hugged her tight. 
 
 "I've got you, Meg," he said. "You're all right. It 
 was only a joke of daddy's. " He turned his head. " Come 
 on, old man," he called. 
 
 His burden in his arms, he climbed the steps. 
 
 Teddy followed him, dripping. 
 
 The doctor butted his way through the clinging crowd 
 at the top of the steps. 
 
 "Shame!" called a woman. 
 
 "Murder!" muttered another. 
 
 "Lynch him!" groaned a third. 
 
 "Oh, Mr. Hankey!" cried a fourth. 
 
 A man's masterful voice was heard. It was Fat Chops, 
 the policeman. 
 
 "Hullo, sir! what's all this?" 
 
 The doctor marched on remorselessly, breathing 
 deep. 
 
 "Plucky rescue!" he gasped. "Saved the child. An- 
 other minute he'd have been too late." 
 
 Fat Chops stared. 
 
 "Why, they told me he was drowning her," he 
 cried. 
 
 The doctor snorted. 
 
 " Like 'em," he said. " Come on, Ted." 
 
 He marched dripping down the Wall, Teddy trotting 
 at his heels, and a patter of children behind them. 
 
 Fat Chops dropped behind to harangue the women. 
 
326 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Now then! Who ye been kiddin'?" his big voice 
 came, half angry, half relieved. 
 
 The little procession turned down out of the narrow 
 Wall into broad Archery Row. 
 
 Loo was racing down the Row toward them, her face 
 white and set. 
 
 The doctor yodled cheerfully. 
 
 "She's all right, mother," he called, and hearing Fat 
 Chops behind still arguing with the women, "Tumbled 
 in. Her father saved her just in time." 
 
 "Drowned her, ye mean!" cried a woman. 
 
 "Boo!" jeered another. 
 
 "Ought to be drowned 'isself !" said a third. 
 
 Meg saw her mother and waved, her little face muddy 
 and streaming still. 
 
 "Mum!" she called. 
 
 "Is she all right?" gasped Loo. 
 
 "Fit as a fiddle," panted the doctor. "Aren't you, 
 sweetheart?" 
 
 The child smiled, and the doctor surrendered her to her 
 mother. 
 
 "Give her a glass of hot milk and put her to bed in 
 blankets, and she'll be as right as rain to-morrow morn- 
 ing," he panted; and he went back to the corner to lie 
 magnificently to the policeman. 
 
 Father, mother, and child pursued their homeward 
 way. 
 
DOCTOR ENGLISH LIES 327 
 
 "Oh, Ted!" was all the mother said. 
 The street stood in their doors to watch as the family 
 trailed dripping by. 
 The woman with the caged bird peeped out. 
 Teddy lifted dull eyes to her as he passed. 
 " They beat me ! " he said. " I ain't got out." 
 
BOOK III 
 HIS RESURRECTION 
 
He becometh an understanding dream andfareth into the world beyond. 
 Upanishads. 
 
XXXVI 
 THE RESURRECTION MORNING 
 
 Every Hell has a bottom; but Heaven knows no roof. 
 
 That night the soul of Teddy Hankey touched earth 
 and thenceforth began to rise on fluttering wings. 
 
 It was in the hour before the dawn that the change took 
 place. 
 
 In the night there had been storms. Now the rain- 
 scuds had ceased to thrash the window; and there was a 
 dismal glimmer of moon on the leagues of shining roofs 
 and the river that ran in snake-like silvery loops through 
 the murky heart of the city. 
 
 Teddy was aware of the change. Something seemed to 
 give way within him. The ache and strain that had 
 darkened his life for weeks past eased off very quietly. 
 
 He had touched bottom and was rising slowly out of the 
 deeps toward the light. 
 
 Very still he lay and as it were watched the miracle 
 that was being wrought within his spectral body. 
 
 Something was going from him, something coming to 
 him. His life was oozing away and coming again. The 
 old dead-weight on his heart was lifting at last. The top 
 
 331 
 
332 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 had been taken off his cage. He began to soar on weak 
 if joyful wings. 
 
 With an effort he roused himself. 
 
 "Loo!" he whispered in smothered voice. 
 
 She did not answer him. He listened to her even, regu- 
 lar breathing. 
 
 Loo was tired; Loo needed her rest. He was tired him- 
 self; but he could wait. 
 
 He lay quite still in the darkness, only his eyelids mov- 
 ing, watching and waiting. 
 
 Some one had rolled away the stone from the mouth of 
 the tomb; and his soul, white-robed and wonderful, was 
 stealing forth. 
 
 In the darkness he smiled to himself; he was so 
 happy. 
 
 His heart, long dry, began to brim with love. 
 
 In the little room next door he heard Meg stirring in her 
 cot. 
 
 Outside a sea-bird from the river croaked in the night 
 overhead. A far cart creaked and rumbled; and the great 
 city turned in its sleep. 
 
 Teddy nodded as he heard. 
 
 He felt wonderfully kind to all the world, and not least 
 to the old city ... his friend and enemy of so many 
 years . . . the million-souled city with the streak of 
 steel running through the heart of it . . . this old 
 city that he loved though it had slain him. 
 
THE RESURRECTION MORNING 333 
 
 The dawn was at hand. 
 
 There was a faint glimmer now through the blind. 
 
 Teddy lay with eyes that blinked in the darkness, and 
 watched the light grow. 
 
 "Come on!" he whispered. 
 
 The light brought with it a huge vague hope that lifted 
 him heavenward on its crest. 
 
 He was wonderfully happy, and strangely tired. 
 
 Once or twice he sighed — whether from weariness or 
 joy, who shall say? 
 
 His fight was over. He was doffing his battle-dusty 
 armour and entering into a great peace. And the symbol 
 of his defeat that was a victory was the red thread that 
 streamed from his mouth and lay across his chin and ran 
 down and gathered in the hollow of his throat and spread 
 on to his phantom chest in dark flood there and trickled on 
 to the sackcloth palliasse and dripped, dripped on to the 
 floor. 
 
 He put his finger to his lips, and when he withdrew it, 
 it was wet. 
 
 Teddy knew what was happening, and he was not 
 afraid. 
 
 He was too happy, and too tired. 
 
 Then he shut his eyes, and immediately the faces of the 
 three women who had been Life to him because they had 
 been Love, rose before him as from the deeps of dark 
 waters and floated on the surface of his mind. 
 
334 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Mum," he muttered; "Loo," and "Meg," and held 
 out his hands in the darkness. 
 
 The tears of joy and weakness poured down his face as 
 he dropped his hands; for he was too weak to hold them 
 out long, and he smiled to himself. 
 
 The darkness was drifting out of his life, and the light 
 was pouring into it. 
 
 Yesterday — or was it millions of years ago? Meg in 
 his arms, he had snatched at that light, and because he had 
 snatched it had not come. 
 
 Now it was coming of itself unsought. 
 
 The joy of it was great and growing, and marred only 
 by a dim sense that it was somehow selfish and that he 
 must struggle, struggle on. 
 
 There was no effort required of him, no battle, no will. 
 
 That was all behind him. He had but to lean back in 
 perfect faith upon the broad and darkling bosom of that 
 unseen tide to be borne toward the haven awaiting him 
 beyond. 
 
 The ineffable peace and beauty of it filled his soul. 
 He would not stir. He would not even rouse dear Loo 
 to tell her he was dying. 
 
 Outside the mammoth city began to stir, to yawn, to 
 rub its eyes, and stretch league-long limbs under dun 
 skies. 
 
 One by one its million strings of light went out. It 
 
THE RESURRECTION MORNING 335 
 
 lay squandered in the blear-eyed dawn beside the slug- 
 gish river that moved shining through its still midst, 
 creeping seaward, swirling silvery-brown against the 
 arches of huge bridges, slopping against the black sides of 
 ships, slipping along deserted wharves, and tumbling the 
 body of a blue-skirted girl who last night had committed 
 her body to its cold keeping. 
 
 With groans, oaths, mutterings, the songless city was 
 setting once more about the whole vast business of living. 
 
 A milkman came round clanking; down in the street, 
 doors opened; and the dawn-sound of feet running slip- 
 slod to factory, dock, and yard was heard anew. 
 
 Loo woke to another day and the memory of the misery 
 of what had been the previous evening. 
 
 She turned to her husband. 
 
 In the dusk she could see nothing but Teddy's eyes 
 open and glimmering. 
 
 She put her hand upon his body. He was lying 
 naked beneath the old soldier-cloak, borrowed by her 
 last night, that covered them both. 
 
 The bitterness passed. A wave of mother-tenderness 
 stole over her as she felt his thinness, and recalled him as 
 he stood yesterday evening a naked, shivering ghost be- 
 side the refuse-heap in the kitchen, his clothes making a 
 sopping pile at his feet. 
 
 "Well, old man," she said. 
 
336 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He did not answer, did not turn his head, but his 
 fingers sought hers. 
 
 " How cold you are ! " she cried. " Like death ! " 
 
 Something dripped, dripped on her hand. Her elbow 
 seemed set in a puddle. Everything was wet and sloppy. 
 
 She gasped and sat bolt upright. 
 
 Then she sprang to the window and looked at her hand. 
 In that faint light she saw that it was dark. 
 
 "Ted!" she screamed. "What 'ave you done?" and 
 rushing back to the bedside snatched the cloak back from 
 his bare body. 
 
 She could not see much, and perhaps it was as well; but 
 she could see enough in that dim light. He lay beneath 
 her, his eyes open and staring, his throat and chest 
 splotched with shining darkness. 
 
 She tumbled up against the wall, and rocked there. 
 
 "My Jesus!" she screamed, her hands pressed against 
 her eyes to shut out that deadful vision. "Where did you 
 get it?" 
 
 Small hands fumbled at the door. It opened. Meg 
 stood in the door, a little figure in a cloud of white, whim- 
 pering in the darkness. 
 
 "Mum!" she cried. 
 
 Loo rushed at her and drove her out. 
 
 " Go back ! " she cried. " Go back ! Daddy's done it." 
 
 Then her love for him overcame all else. 
 
 She fell on her knees at the bedside. 
 
THE RESURRECTION MORNING 337 
 
 " Ted ! " she cried. " My Ted ! come back." 
 
 His eyes blinked, and she knew he was not dead. 
 
 "I'll forgive you if you'll only come round," she gasped. 
 "I will! I swear I will." 
 
 He nodded his head, and she almost laughed. 
 
 "Half a mo!" she cried, ran downstairs into the kitchen, 
 where the refuse-heap of yesterday still cumbered the 
 floor and stank, and swept cupboard and chimney-piece 
 for a match. 
 
 There was none. 
 
 She rushed upstairs again, and flinging up the window 
 looked out. 
 
 It was still dusk and she could not see a soul. 
 
 "Ted!" she gasped. "I must go for Doctor English. 
 It's too dark to send Meg." 
 
 She had gone to sleep in her clothes — partly for 
 warmth, and partly because she had nothing else to sleep 
 in. 
 
 He nodded at her, clutched her fingers feebly in his 
 clay-cold grasp and let them go. 
 
 She bent over him desperately. 
 
 "Can't you speak, Ted?" she besought him in breaking 
 voice. "Owe word." 
 
 He gurgled, 
 
 "Loo," from very far away. 
 
 She kissed him passionately. 
 
 A little whimpering voice came from Meg's room. 
 
338 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The mother steadied herself and went to the child. 
 
 "Daddy's not well, Meg," she called, soft and sooth- 
 ing. "I must fetch the doctor. It's all right. Be a 
 good girl, now, lovey, and go to sleep." 
 
 Gently she closed the door and locked it. 
 
 The child should not see thatl 
 
 Then she called valiantly, 
 
 "I'll be back in a minute, Ted," and rushed downstairs 
 and out into the dreary street, running along with panting 
 heart; and as she ran she gasped and whimpered. 
 
 A woman in the dusk of a door shaking a mat heard her. 
 
 "What is it?" she asked hoarsely, as the other hunted 
 sobbing by. 
 
 "Ted's cut his throat!" she panted and was gone. 
 
 The woman routed her neighbour out to tell her the 
 news, banging at her window with a broom to that end. 
 
 Soon the news was all down the street. Women called 
 it to one another from upper windows. Men whispered 
 it as they went to work. There was quite a commotion 
 among the starlings of the street. People clustered to- 
 gether and shook wise and foolish heads over it. The 
 wise had always known; the foolish wouldn't have be- 
 lieved. 
 
 The lank and somewhat morose youth in a waistcoat 
 cleaning the steps of the Brighton Arms at the end of 
 the street gladly ceased his work to watch, and wondered. 
 
THE RESURRECTION MORNING 339 
 
 A sagacious young man in the blue of an engineer pass- 
 ing on his way to work, a carpet-bag on his back, whistled 
 and jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the direction 
 of Archery Row. 
 
 " Another on 'em," he said with the mysterious ellipsis 
 loved by the lower class. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Done it." 
 
 He drew a forefinger across his throat. 
 
 "Who?" 
 
 "'Ankey. Twenty-three. Gingery nut. You know. 
 Cocky chap, used to be." 
 
 The morose youth woke up. 
 
 "What! him that got into trouble through plugging the 
 copper outside our shop?" 
 
 "That's him." 
 
 "What's come to him then now?" asked the morose 
 youth. "Plugged 'isself instead of the copper this time, 
 has he?" 
 
 "Cut his throat, my boy," answered the other with the 
 flippancy of the young man of blood who assumes cal- 
 lousness to show that he is brave. "And his child's! 
 — and his wife's ! Only she got away before he'd quite 
 finished 'er, and scoffed down the street, streaming blood, 
 and yelling murder." 
 
 "And a good job too, I should siy — if I'd been 'er," 
 said the morose youth. " What's the trouble then? " 
 
340 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Out o' work, my boy. Sold up everything. Couldn't 
 stick it no more." 
 
 The youth in the waistcoat spat contemptuously. He 
 had never been out of work himself. 
 
 "What!" he scoffed. "Cut your throat for a little 
 thing like that! I'd be ashamed." 
 
 The sagacious young man wagged a superior head. He 
 was a year older than the other, and liked to show it. 
 
 "Ah, I dunno," he said shrewdly. "You wait," and 
 passed on, whistling with his news. 
 
XXXVII 
 THE PRIEST OF TO-DAY 
 
 Doctor English had been up all night. 
 
 On the previous evening his sister had come home, and 
 the pair had sat up late talking. 
 
 Just as he was going to bed a policeman had called 
 him up to attend a case in a common lodging-house 
 hard by. 
 
 When he returned home it was too late to bother about 
 bed, aod he betook himself to a favourite occupation of 
 his. 
 
 Doffing his coat, he sat at the open window, the wind 
 on his forehead, looking over dark roofs to await and 
 watch the dawn. 
 
 As the light brought with it a little wind that crept up 
 the river, across the roofs, and caressed his brow, he 
 heard a voice at the speaking-tube beside him. 
 
 "Well?" he called. 
 
 "Doctor English," gasped a voice. 
 
 "Yes. Who is it?" 
 
 "Mrs. Hankey, sir. Quick!" 
 
 He flung on his coat and ran downstairs. 
 
 341 
 
342 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 A woman fluttered in the door; a wan face peered at 
 him out of the dusk; somebody was panting. 
 
 "Ah! is that you, Mrs. Hankey?" he said. "What is 
 it?" 
 
 "Ted's cut his throat, sir," the woman gasped. 
 
 "One minute," he said quietly, ran into his surgery, and 
 stuffed bandages, cotton-wool, a needle and other things 
 into his bag. 
 
 He was at her side again in a minute. 
 
 "Ill go on," he said. "You take your time, or you'll 
 strain your heart. No. 23, aren't you?" 
 
 The dawn stole gray about his head, bald at the crown 
 as though tonsured, as he sped. 
 
 A thousand years ago on that same road, then but a 
 marshy track, a priest, tonsured he too, had run on 
 such another dawn on such another errand of mercy 
 to a swineherd dying of much the same disease in a 
 hovel on much the same spot. The one man carried 
 an injection squirt, a phial of strychnine, and medic- 
 aments; the other the mass. Where Love unarmed 
 with anything but a belief in its being had once sped to 
 soothe a passing soul it could not assist, Love now armed 
 with knowledge rushed to the rescue, anxious and resolute 
 to save. 
 
 Fast as the doctor ran, Loo was at the house almost as 
 soon as he. 
 
 The room was still very dim, Teddy's eyes the only 
 
THE PRIEST OF TO-DAY 343 
 
 light in it. And whether his eyelids moved or not the 
 doctor was not sure. 
 
 He grasped the dying man's thin wrist and felt his pulse, 
 faint and far away. 
 
 "He ain't gone, sir?" gasped Loo at his side. 
 
 "No. He's not gone," panted the doctor. "Light 
 the gas." 
 
 "I got no match." 
 
 "Here you are." 
 
 A pale broad blade of flame sprang out in the dusk. 
 
 Teddy lay with bare breast-bone underneath the old 
 military cloak — a haggard ghost, red of hair, and blue of 
 eye, faintly smiling. 
 
 Quietly the doctor pulled the cloak aside. 
 
 The little cockney seemed to shine beneath it. He was 
 quite naked, thin as a spectre, slight as a boy, and some- 
 how luminous. On the white of his body the best of him 
 lay squandered in dark flood that dripped on to the sack- 
 cloth palliasse and thence on to the floor. Beneath the 
 cloak that was his only covering his bare feet with their 
 pathetic big toes projected forlornly into the air. 
 
 The doctor bent. 
 
 "Ted, old boy," he said, " d'you know me?" 
 
 The sick man nodded; the blue eyes smiled. 
 
 A clammy hand closed round the doctor's big finger and 
 clung to it. 
 
 Loo bent over the dying man. 
 
344 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Ted!" she sobbed. "You shouldn't ought to have 
 done it. It is naughty of you." 
 
 The doctor moved her aside with tender firmness. 
 
 "Cut his throat!" he said quietly. "What a character 
 you give him, mother! It's a plain case of hemorrhage. 
 Think he was going to leave you in the lurch? Not he." 
 
 Loo's tears fell on her husband's face. 
 
 "Oh, Ted! " she cried. "And I thought you'd done it." 
 
 The big doctor bent over the white wisp of a man be- 
 neath him. 
 
 "Now I'm going to prick you, old boy," he said. 
 "This is only a little salt and water. Hold tight." He 
 used his injection syringe. 
 
 "Can you speak, Ted?" gasped Loo. 
 
 The other's lips seemed glued together. Slowly they 
 opened, and his voice came faintly: 
 
 "Love me, Loo." 
 
 She kissed his forehead. 
 
 Doctor English nodded. 
 
 "That's right," he said. "Richard's himself again. 
 Don't talk, though." 
 
 Little hands fumbled at the door. 
 
 "Don't let the child in, mother," said the doctor. 
 "We don't want her to see daddy like this. We must 
 swab him up a bit first. Has he got a clean shirt?" 
 
 "No, sir," sobbed Loo. "That he hasn't. Took all 
 his wet things off last night when he come in. I'd noth- 
 
THE PRIEST OF TO-DAY 345 
 
 ing to give him. So I borrowed this old cloak to lay 
 over him." 
 
 "No towels?" 
 
 "No, sir. Not a thing." 
 
 The doctor walked to the window and opened it. 
 Dimly he was aware of a group of women gathered in the 
 street outside. 
 
 "Bring me some towels and a sponge, will you?" he 
 said very quietly. "And if you can spare a blanket or so, 
 any of you!" 
 
 The crowd scattered, and the doctor returned to the 
 bedside. 
 
 Taking off his own warm waistcoat he wrapped the 
 sick man's feet in it and spread his overcoat over the still 
 figure beneath the cloak. 
 
 "Cheer, old boy," he said in his strangely quiet voice. 
 "Never say die." 
 
 Teddy smiled at him with pale blue eyes. 
 
 "There!" said Loo, bending over him like a mother 
 over her first born. "He's smiling. How are you, old 
 man?" 
 
 "'Appy," whispered the dying cockney, and curled a 
 cold finger about hers. 
 
 The doctor turned away. 
 
 "The bleeding's stopped," he said in a sighing voice. 
 "There's nothing like a doctor to frighten it away. It'll 
 not come again. You've bled yourself dry, old boy." 
 
346 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He put on his coat. "I'll run round to the chemist's, 
 and then send blankets and hot-water bottles and things. 
 Don't let him stir or talk." 
 
 He went out breathing heavily. 
 
 On the landing was little Meg, half -dressed and whim- 
 pering. He took her in his arms and tramped downstairs. 
 
 In the kitchen women moved with difficulty amidst the 
 litter and smell of smoke, and lifted white faces. 
 
 He gave the child to one, and asked another to put hot 
 water on to boil. 
 
 "There's no coal, sir," said the woman. "I looked." 
 
 "There's no nothing," said a second, throwing back a 
 cupboard door. 
 
 "Only this," remarked a third, and pointed to the floor. 
 
 There before the fire was the refuse-heap still smelling 
 of stale smoke — ashes, tea-leaves, broken jam-pots, and 
 crockery, scorched curtains, coverlets, and bolsters piled 
 up in littered desolation, and on top of them, a fitting 
 crown to the edifice, a heap of sodden clothes, strangely 
 pathetic. 
 
 On the table was a broken-spouted teapot a-brim with 
 pawn-tickets resting on a blue notice to quit. 
 
 Doctor English coughed. It may have been the stale 
 smoke still hanging about the room that touched up his 
 throat, or it may have been something else. 
 
 Then he passed on to the parlour. 
 
 And if the kitchen was a refuse-heap, the parlour was 
 
THE PRIEST OF TO-DAY 347 
 
 a desert. Walls and floor and window alike were bare of 
 everything save accumulated dust, damp-spots upon the 
 wall, and a cheap print of the Good Shepherd. 
 
 Hard by it, scrawled in charcoal, was Teddy's farewell 
 message to his wife. 
 
 The big man stood before the writing on the wall and 
 read: 
 
 Dear Loo: 
 This way when you've had enough. Meg and me are going on. 
 
 Your loving husband, 
 
 Ted. 
 
 Then he turned to the window and looked out. 
 
 Mrs. Baxter came running in with towels and a sponge. 
 
 "Here you are, sir!" she cried. 
 
 He paid no .heed. 
 
 Doctor English wept. 
 
XXXVIII 
 THE LAST OF THE RELIEVING OFFICER 
 
 The chemist's shop was not open, and Doctor English 
 trotted on home. 
 
 On the stairs he met his sister, thinner than of old. 
 
 "How tired you look, Edmund," she said. "Been at 
 it all night?" 
 
 "Can you let me have a couple of hot-water bottles, 
 and a pair of sheets, and a blanket or two, and some 
 tinned soup, and anything in the way of petticoats and 
 that sort of thing you can spare?" he asked, striding up 
 the stairs. 
 
 "Anything else?" asked the lady ironically. "Mary, 
 the doctor wants all our house-linen, and the cook's 
 stores, and my under-clothes. I suppose he must have 
 them." 
 
 "It's not the first time, 'm," smiled Mary. 
 
 " Lucky I had you to keep an eye on the store-cupboard 
 when I was away," said Miss English grimly. 
 
 "They're destitute," came the doctor's voice from his 
 room. 
 
 "We soon shall be," said Miss English, busy at a cup- 
 
 348 
 
LAST OF THE RELIEVING OFFICER 349 
 
 board in the landing. "Edmund! shall we fill the hot- 
 water bottles?" 
 
 "Good idea!" came the doctor's voice. "Mary, run 
 and whistle a taxi for me, will you?" 
 
 He emerged from his room, a suit of pajamas over his 
 arm, and a pair of night-socks in his hand. 
 
 "Do have some breakfast first, Eddy," urged his sister 
 shrilly from the dining-room. "Ham toast." 
 
 " I'll be back at once," he answered. " I must just take 
 these round." 
 
 The taxi was at the door and Mary was loading it with 
 best Witney blankets, linen sheets, hot-water bottles, 
 comforts and medicaments. 
 
 Then Doctor English came down the steps. 
 
 As he did so the Relieving Officer hurried by. 
 
 Mr. Starkie looked less martial than usual. He did not 
 march; he trotted swiftly, like a dog who is afraid. 
 
 As he saw the other he made a sudden half-halt. 
 
 "Heard this, sir?" he panted. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Hankey's cut his throat and all." 
 
 Doctor English thrust his hands into his pockets. 
 
 "Ah," he said quietly. "Bad job for you, Mr. Star- 
 kie." 
 
 The other's eyes started in his gray face. 
 
 "For God's sake, Doctor English!" he cried. "You 
 don't blame me." 
 
350 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Doctor English looked mild and stepped delicately into 
 his cab. 
 
 He was smiling still as it drew up at No. 23. 
 
 The woman scrubbing on her knees in the parlour looked 
 up, and her eyes were streaming. 
 
 It was Mrs. Baxter. 
 
 " 'Tis a shame, sir," she said. "A good woman like that." 
 
 Doctor English walked on. 
 
 In the kitchen, too, kind hands had been at work. 
 
 The refuse-heap had been cleared away; the cupboard 
 was no longer bare; a fire was chattering merrily in the 
 range; a neighbour was busy with brushes, pans, and 
 cloths. 
 
 The doctor went upstairs to the sick man's room, the 
 blankets in his arms. 
 
 There too was a change. The window was open; a 
 fire burned in the grate. On the floor was a mattress 
 and a heap of bedding. 
 
 Loo was leaning over her invalid, feeding him out of a 
 spoon like a little child. 
 
 The faces of the two were very close, and Teddy's bare 
 arm was wound about his wife's waist. 
 
 The pair were murmuring to each other. 
 
 Then they both chuckled, children and lovers that they 
 were. 
 
 The doctor dropped his burden of blankets and stood in 
 the door. 
 
LAST OF THE RELIEVING OFFICER 351 
 
 A sudden shyness possessed him. He lowered his eyes. 
 He felt he had no business there. 
 
 Then he coughed. 
 
 Loo heard and turned. 
 
 "Is that you, sir?" 
 
 He crossed to the bed quietly. 
 
 "Well, how is he?" 
 
 "Why, sir, good as gold." She pointed to the heap of 
 bedclothes on the floor, the gift of some neighbour. " They 
 brought me this. Only I didn't dare to shift him till you 
 come, sir." 
 
 Together they washed their invalid and warmed him. 
 
 They put a mattress on the bed, sheets on the mattress, 
 and Teddy, lost in the doctor's pajamas, on the sheets. 
 
 He lay with his red head resting on pillows and bol- 
 sters, his feet propped against hot-water bottles. 
 
 The colour flowed back to his cheeks; the light returned 
 to his eyes; in his drained body the slow, thin blood began 
 to circulate again. His feet and hands glowed. His cock- 
 ney soul came back to him, cheeky and chirping. He 
 winked a wan blue eye and cracked old jokes to please him- 
 self and tease the doctor, who had forbidden him to talk. 
 
 "The sooner I get out of this, the better, I see," said 
 the doctor, feigning grim displeasure. "There's no hold- 
 ing the chap." 
 
 Loo followed him out. 
 
 "They talk about the infirmary, sir," she stammered. 
 
352 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 " Never !" he said. "He mustn't be moved." 
 
 She thanked him mutely. 
 
 Then he turned quietly away. 
 
 At the door he met Mr. Starkie. The Relieving Officer 
 was carrying a packet of groceries and medical comforts; 
 and a coal cart was at the door. 
 
 The man's face was anxious and sullen behind his mili- 
 tary moustache. 
 
 "Any hope for him?" he asked. 
 
 "None whatever," said the doctor briefly, and passed 
 on. 
 
XXXIX 
 
 THE POLICEMAN 
 
 Doctor English returned at midday. 
 
 Quietly he climbed the stairs. 
 
 Loo was standing in the dusk at the top, her eyes swim- 
 ming in her pale face. 
 
 "I got nothing for you, sir," she said shyly. 
 
 He made no answer, but gave her his hand. 
 
 "One thing," she continued. "It won't be for long." 
 
 He was silent, and would not meet her seeking eyes. 
 
 "I know," she went on. "You needn't tell me. I 
 know." 
 
 They turned into the sick man's room. 
 
 A fire was burning in the grate. The window was open, 
 and through it the sun shone, and a warm air entered. 
 
 Teddy lay flat upon the pillowless bed, Meg sitting 
 beside him, playing with her daddy's fingers. He seemed 
 transparent as an anemone, faintly flushed, and radiant, 
 and his pale blue eyes that sought the doctor's were full 
 of Hght and love. 
 
 "How are you now, old boy?" said the doctor. 
 
 "Just 'appy, sir," said the little cockney. 
 
 853 
 
354 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 The doctor lifted Meg from the bed, and took his 
 patient's thin wrist in his hand. Then he opened the 
 other's pa jama jacket, and watched his bare and faintly 
 heaving chest. He tapped here, and listened there. 
 
 "That's all," he said. "I'm not going to disturb you 
 any more, old boy." And he buttoned the other up in 
 the pajama jacket that enfolded him like a cloud. 
 
 Then he went to the window and looked out as he dried 
 his hands. There was little to see or hear: a long brown 
 street, a row of dingy gray houses, a canopy of mottled 
 sky, and the movement and mutter of seven millions of 
 men encamped for leagues about their dying comrade. 
 
 He turned away. 
 
 "Go on as you're doing, Mrs. Hankey," he said. "I'll 
 look in again this evening," and he went out. 
 
 A huge black form, helmeted, darkened the street-door. 
 
 It was Fat Chops, the policeman. 
 
 The man touched his helmet. 
 
 "We heard at the station there's a case of suicide here, 
 sir," he began awkwardly. 
 
 "Suicide?" said Doctor English quietly. "Murder, 
 you mean." 
 
 "Murder?" replied the policeman. "Who by?" 
 
 "Why, you and me," answered the doctor. 
 
 "Eh?" said the policeman, stupid and stolid. 
 
 "Well, go and see for yourself if you don't believe me. 
 He's lying up there." He threw his face up to the open 
 
THE POLICEMAN 355 
 
 window. "Mrs. Hankey, may this man come up and 
 see your husband? " 
 
 Loo smiled down at him that wan spiritual smile of hers. 
 
 "Yes, sir. He may come." 
 
 The policeman entered awkwardly. 
 
 He didn't understand, but he had his duty to perform. 
 
 Heavily he climbed the stairs. 
 
 She waited him at the top. 
 
 She did not know him, did not reason about his office, 
 but in a vague way she felt he represented the thing that 
 had slain her man. 
 
 "You can't hurt him now," she said with the gentle 
 cruelty of a woman. 
 
 "I never want to 'urt nobody — only if they've done 
 wrong," the other answered surlily, and entered. 
 
 The dying cockney lay prone on the bed, his eyes seek- 
 ing the policeman's. 
 
 His ginger hair, dark about the brow, made a halo of 
 flame about his head. The sun slanted in and lit the 
 transparent hands with their thin down-turned nails that 
 lay upon the bed. Streams of love poured from his pale 
 blue eyes and seemed to flood the dark figure in the door. 
 
 " 'Ellow, oP pal," he said in his faint, faraway voice. 
 
 The big pink policeman, a mass of meat and beer and 
 honest English manhood, began to tremble. He was in 
 the presence of Death — he saw it at a glance. Single- 
 handed, before now he had tackled a gang of armed anar- 
 
356 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 chists. In the presence of this dying man, ghostly lit by 
 some inward radiance, he felt afraid. 
 
 Removing his helmet, he stood in the door red-jowled 
 and with short harsh hair. 
 
 " I'm sorry to see this, 'Ankey," he muttered. 
 
 "I ain't, old mate," said the cockney, with a ghost of 
 his old chirpiness. "I'm just all right." 
 
 The other's big fingers played with the strap of his hel- 
 met. His huge bulk seemed to fill the room and make him 
 awkward and ashamed before the radiant skeleton on the 
 bed. 
 
 He lumbered a step closer and bent, with his hands on 
 his knees, his great red face close to the other's ghostly 
 one. 
 
 "I 'ope you got nothing against me, 'Ankey," he said in 
 low voice. "I only done my duty." 
 
 Teddy turned his head on the mattress, and his eyes 
 were close to the other's. 
 
 "No, I got nothing against you, ol' man," he said. "I 
 got nothing against nobody. They never meant no 
 'arm." 
 
 He sought the other's hand. 
 
 The great fellow took the thin claw in his meaty and 
 massive fist. 
 
 "01' man," said Teddy. "01' man." 
 
 Suddenly the big policeman coughed and began to cry. 
 
 He stood up straight, the tears pouring down his face. 
 
THE POLICEMAN 357 
 
 Then he turned his broad blue back that seemed to fill 
 the room like a cloud and tramped away. 
 
 "Cheer, or mate!" came the thin voice behind him. 
 
 " Good-bye," croaked the policeman, never turning, and 
 went out. 
 
 He tramped down the stairs. 
 
 Loo followed him to the door. 
 
 "It's not your fault, Mister," she said gently. 
 
 At the foot of the stairs he paused. 
 
 "He's got nothing against me, Mrs 'Ankey, 'as he?" he 
 gulped. 
 
 "No. That I'm sure he's not," she cried with swift 
 sympathy. "He got nothing against nobody. He loves 
 'em all." 
 
 The policeman swallowed. 
 
 "Good-day," he said, and swaggered blindly down the 
 street, his helmet cocked over his eyes. 
 
XL 
 FALLING DUSK 
 
 The dying of Teddy Hankey was no great affair. 
 There was no calling of priests to ease his soul to rest; 
 no summoning of solicitors to dispose of the accumula- 
 tions of a lifetime. 
 
 Like the bulk of his fellow countrymen in the richest 
 country beneath the sun he had nothing to leave but the 
 memory of a man who had laboured, loved, and made mis- 
 takes, and who on the whole had kept his end up fairly 
 well considering. 
 
 It was given to him to die in his own home. 
 
 And he had asked no more than that, which is the goal 
 and life ambition of millions of his fellow workingmen. 
 During these last few lingering days of life, when most he 
 needed them, he had about his bed those he loved best 
 and not the well-meant mechanical service of hireling 
 hands. 
 
 The future of Meg and Loo did not disturb him. 
 He did not say that God would see to them; he did 
 not even think it. He was too near the Heart of 
 Truth to doubt. 
 
 858 
 
FALLING DUSK 359 
 
 And so one evening when Loo was out of the room and 
 Doctor English, leaning over the bed, said quietly, 
 
 " Meg and the missus '11 be all right, Ted." 
 
 The dying man answered in that faraway voice of his, 
 
 " Yes, sir. They'll be all right," 
 
 He did not even say thank you; he had faith, which is 
 beyond words. 
 
 Moreover, he was not going to die. 
 
 He told the doctor so, and Loo. 
 
 "I ain't a-goin out," he said in his weak chirp. "Now, 
 I ain't. I feel as if I should live for ever." 
 
 "So you will," said the doctor. 
 
 Loo bent over her invalid, smiling. 
 
 "You're an old fraud, ain't you, Ted?" she chaffed. 
 
 "I am that," he answered. 
 
 Teddy lay thus all day, the love streaming from those 
 sky-blue eyes of his on Loo, on little Meg, on Doctor Eng- 
 lish, on the blank walls, and the cheap print of the Saviour, 
 on the dingy windows, and the roofs of the houses 
 opposite. 
 
 He was so happy, so good, so like a little child. 
 
 Those last days were the best of his life, and of Loo's 
 too. 
 
 "I wish it could last for ever," she said. 
 
 "Perhaps it does," replied the doctor. 
 
 A hush fell on him each time he entered the sick room : 
 
360 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 for he felt himself in the presence of a greater than the 
 little man dying in the bed — something of which that 
 shred of suffering humanity was the symbol; something of 
 eternal import, of darkling beauty, sad, sweet, and strong. 
 
 He came very often. 
 
 Loo noticed it. 
 
 " I got nothing for you, sir," she reminded him with her 
 wan smile. 
 
 He lifted a protesting hand. 
 
 "I can't keep away," he said. "It's just that." 
 
 Indeed that little room drew him as the altar draws the 
 priest. 
 
 Set amid those murky millions, seething all about it, 
 it shone like a star in the wastes of night. 
 
 Here was Peace; here was Joy. 
 
 The Lord had manifested himself at last in the heart of 
 a tuberculous cockney, dying in a mean street south of the 
 river, unknown of any, and honoured only of the God 
 who made him. 
 
 At the other end of the town there was about to take 
 place the coronation of a King and Queen. 
 
 Men and women were rushing across oceans and con- 
 tinents to see the show. The old gray Abbey, beautiful 
 beside the river, was hedged with bulwarks of yellow seats. 
 And within it an inconspicuous little man with a beard, 
 good and very tidy, was to go through a wearisome cere- 
 
FALLING DUSK 361 
 
 monial with all the princes of this world and their prin- 
 cesses, gorgeous in panoply of state, congregated about 
 him under the shadow of the Cross. 
 
 Doctor English would not attend that ceremony; he 
 would not see that spectacle. He preferred to sit in this 
 quiet room in this dull street amid low houses and hear the 
 startling chatter and watch a son of man fade away into 
 the silence. 
 
 There were never two souls nearer to each other and the 
 Great One than the little leather-worker and his wife dur- 
 ing those last days. 
 
 "He's like a little child," said Loo, tears in her eyes, 
 "that good and grateful." 
 
 By day she nursed him; at night she slept at his side. 
 
 When she left the room, the light left his face too; and 
 his eyes were on the door till she returned. 
 
 She told Doctor English of it. 
 
 "There he is prying for me like a child," she gulped. 
 "It's lovely." 
 
 Teddy loved best to lie with his red head on the bend of 
 Loo's arm, while she fed him with grapes, placing them in 
 his mouth, and removing the skin as for a child. 
 
 More than once Doctor English, finding them thus 
 loverlike, went out softly as he had entered. 
 
 Now and then the sick man wandered a little. 
 
 Sometimes he called Loo Mum, and sometimes Meg. 
 
362 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Once as the night was coming down and they lay to- 
 gether thus, he said in his dreamy way : 
 
 "Loo, where d'you think Paradise is?" 
 
 She bent over him. 
 
 "I don't know, old man. Is it one of the great 
 stars?" 
 
 The little cockney shook his head. 
 
 "Where then?" 
 
 " Here ! " He waved his spectral hand to and fro in the 
 air before his face, as one dispersing a mist that he might 
 see through it. 
 
 "Can you see it?" she asked. 
 
 He did not answer directly. 
 
 "It's all in wyves," he said dreamily, and he made an 
 undulatory motion with his hand. 
 
 Loo was stirred. 
 
 "Can I see it?" she asked. 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "You can't. Your body's too thick like, Loo," he said 
 gently. "Mine's a bit thinner now; and I can't see 
 much." 
 
 "Is there aingels and that — wings?" asked the pro- 
 saic Loo. 
 
 "I don't know nothing about no aingels," the other 
 answered. " It just keeps on a-comin' — rainbow wyves 
 — beautiful, beautiful." His hand rose and fell as 
 though floating on a billowy sea. 
 
FALLING DUSK 363 
 
 She told Doctor English when he came later. He 
 examined his patient minutely. 
 
 "There's a great deal of inflammation about that 
 lung/' he told Loo outside. "He's going through a crisis. 
 If he pulls through he may make a rapid recovery — for 
 the time." 
 
 She answered him with the decision of the woman who 
 has faced the worse. 
 
 "No, sir, never. I know. From the way he talks. 
 They'd never let him back now. He knows too much." 
 
 "Lazarus came back," said the great doctor quietly, 
 drying his hands. 
 
 "Yes," she answered, swiftly; "but he never told. 
 Ted's told." 
 
 He went back into the sick room. 
 
 "Keep your heart up, Ted," he said. "You're doing 
 well." 
 
 " I am, sir," answered the other, far away. " I'm doing 
 better nor what you think for." 
 
 "Good-night, old' boy." 
 
 "Good-bye, sir." 
 
XLI 
 TEDDY TRIUMPHANT 
 
 A little later the mother brought in Meg to say good- 
 night. 
 
 The child sat on her daddy's bed as of old. He looked 
 at her and through her, held her plump hand in his thin 
 one, lifted her hair and passed it through his fingers, 
 and tickled her chubby neck. 
 
 She chuckled at him, bowing her head upon her shoul- 
 der, to prevent his assault, and cried, 
 
 "Don't, daddy!" 
 
 Then his interest in the child seemed to fade. 
 
 He ceased to play with her, and his eyes were far away. 
 The mother saw it. 
 
 "Give daddy a kiss," she said. 
 
 The child touched her father's forehead with her 
 lips. 
 
 She might not kiss his lips. 
 
 "Good-night, lovey," he said. "Be a good gal, and do 
 what mother tells you." 
 
 The mother bore her out. 
 
 She went, silent and staring curiously. 
 
 364 
 
TEDDY TRIUMPHANT 365 
 
 When Loo returned she noticed a pucker on the fore- 
 head of the dying man. 
 
 "Was that Meg?" he asked. 
 
 "Yes, old man." 
 
 "Has she gone to bed?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Funny thing she didn't say good-night to her daddy. 
 First time I ever knew her miss." 
 
 His eyes were pained and puzzled. The swift insight 
 of love inspired the mother's utterance. 
 
 "She sent you her good-night by me, dad," she said, 
 bending over him. 
 
 "Ah! that's better," he answered, appeased. 
 
 "I packed her off to bed," continued Loo. "She's a 
 bit tired like. It's the heat. She'll see you again to- 
 morrow before school." 
 
 He nodded, satisfied. 
 
 "Ah, yes!" he said. "To-morrow," and smiled. 
 
 Thereafter he was strangely restless. 
 
 She held the candle anxiously to his eyes; and for the 
 first time during his illness she noticed a look of distress 
 upon his face. 
 
 "J don't somehow feel as if I'd ever get well," he said 
 querulously. "I feel that poorly." 
 
 She mothered him. 
 
 "Do you, old man?" 
 
 He moved his head. 
 
366 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 "Where's the doctor? " 
 
 "He's gone home, Ted. Do you want him?" 
 
 "I could do with him," wearily. 
 
 She went to the window and looked out on the silent 
 city. 
 
 It was Coronation night. Rockets and fireworks were 
 giving a vulgar brilliance to the darkness. 
 
 "He looked very tired, Ted," she said gently. "And 
 he'll be in first thing to-morrow, sure." 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 "Ah, well!" he said. "He's got plenty of trouble of 
 his own." 
 
 She gathered herself on the bed at his side. 
 
 Then he began to doze. 
 
 Since his breakdown his one trouble had been that he 
 could not sleep. As soon as he got off, the faces of his 
 mates rose before him and roused him. 
 
 To-night she heard him greet them man after man by 
 name. 
 
 "'Ellow, Bert! That you, Charlie?" and shook hands 
 with them in pantomime. 
 
 Then he woke. 
 
 "It's too bad," he cried irritably. "Directly I'm off, 
 they rise up afore me." 
 
 "Try again, old man," she said. "I'll try if I can keep 
 them off." He shut his eyes. She waved her hand before 
 them. 
 
TEDDY TRIUMPHANT 367 
 
 Again he dozed and, crying in his sleep "Stop!" reached 
 out his hand, clutching after something, and woke once 
 more. 
 
 Loo rose and went to the window with weeping eyes. 
 
 Outside, the myriad-lighted city was droning slowly off 
 to sleep. Millions of men and women were turning home- 
 ward as the soul of the little cockney strained at its hawser, 
 seeking more sea-room. 
 
 He saw her at the window. 
 
 "Plenty of 'em out there," he said. 
 
 She turned to him, and saw that he was smiling. 
 
 "They've all gone to sleep now," she said. 
 
 "Except only the chaps on the Embankment," he 
 answered. "Daresay Coronytion didn't do them much 
 good." 
 
 She stood over him. 
 
 "Are you easier now, Ted?" she asked. 
 
 He nodded at her and smiled. 
 
 The trouble and distress had passed. 
 
 She made him and herself a cup of tea in an etna lent 
 by Miss English. 
 
 "Come and lay alongside o' me," he said. 
 
 She spread herself beside him, and made of her arm a 
 pillow as he loved. 
 
 His eyes were close to her own, his hollow face near 
 hers. 
 
 "That's cozy," he said. "That's more like." 
 
368 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 He lay some while with shut eyes. Then he opened them. 
 
 "Am I your little boy?" he asked. 
 
 "That you are," she answered tenderly. 
 
 Again there was a pause. 
 
 "What was I like when I was a little chap?" he asked. 
 
 "Why, you was a little terror," she answered, humouring 
 him. 
 
 He seemed satisfied. 
 
 Later he began to talk of the past. Whether he was 
 wandering or not, she was not sure. His talk was lucid, 
 almost luminous. He seemed himself, yet not himself. 
 
 He told of his childhood in Fish Street, played once 
 more with little boys there, and spoke of and to his 
 mother. 
 
 Then he became restless again, his head waving too and 
 fro upon his pillow, his forehead puckered. 
 
 A cloud darkened his face. 
 
 "Oh, I feel so ill," he said. 
 
 Loo bent over him. 
 
 "Do you, dad?" 
 
 He whimpered a little. Then the cloud passed, and 
 his face cleared. 
 
 He smiled at her and beckoned. 
 
 "I felt I was coming back," he whispered. 
 
 She did not understand. 
 
 "Whereto, old man?" 
 
 "To the old world." 
 
TEDDY TRIUMPHANT 369 
 
 He lay and nodded, the joy upon his face, the recogni- 
 tion in his eyes. 
 
 "Oh, Loo!" he whispered in awed delight, and she could 
 feel him trembling. 
 
 "What is it, old man?" 
 
 "I'm in such a beautiful country." 
 
 She bent over him, moved to her deeps by his mys- 
 terious emotion. 
 
 "Can you tell me about your beautiful country?" 
 
 He put his finger to his lips and smiled mysteriously. 
 
 "Hush, Loo, hush!" he whispered. 
 
 His eyes shone like great soft stars; his whole being 
 seemed aglow. 
 
 For long he lay rapt and gazing. 
 
 "Will you pull up the blind, Loo, and watch the sun 
 rise with me?" he whispered at last. 
 
 She smiled at him tenderly. 
 
 "It's dark, old man," she said. A clock struck with- 
 out. "There, it's going one. The sun won't be up for a 
 long time yet." 
 
 He lay still a great while, his eyes rapt and radiant. 
 
 Then his hushed voice came whispering once more upon 
 the silence. 
 
 "Will you pull up the blind, Loo, and watch the sun 
 rise with me?" 
 
 His voice was so earnest, so intent, that she rose from 
 the bed and obeyed. 
 
370 THE ROYAL ROAD 
 
 Outside the lamps shone and over head the night was 
 deep and brilliant. A wind-blown paper strayed down 
 the street like a rustling ghost. In the silence the huge 
 city slept. 
 
 "Is that better?" she asked him. 
 
 He lifted a finger to his lips. 
 
 "Hush, Loo, hush!" he whispered, smiling still, his 
 eyes upon the window. 
 
 She took her place beside him on the bed. Her arm was 
 beneath his head, her hand in his. 
 
 Consciously or unconsciously she raised his head. He 
 gazed out into the large, cool, liberty of night beyond. 
 
 Suddenly his eyes darkened. There was a dry rattle 
 in his throat; and his hand ceased to clutch hers. 
 
 When Doctor English came early next morning he 
 found them lying side by side. 
 
 Loo was sleeping, her eyelids dark, her arm still be- 
 neath her husband's head, her hand in his. 
 
 The doctor hardly knew which face was the more beau- 
 tiful. 
 
 The dead cockney lay red-haired and hollow, ineffably 
 happy, and holy as the dawn. 
 
 And there was no mistaking the calm invincible upon 
 his face. 
 
 The world had conquered Teddy Hankey; and Teddy 
 Hankey had conquered the world. 
 
The Country Life Press 
 Garden City, N. Y. 
 

 
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