He had just, for the sixth time, won through to "Iyam-ah waiting for-er theeee-yass-thorre," and was doing some intricate three-chord work preparatory to starting over again, when a loaf of bread whizzed past his ear. It missed him by an inch, and crashed against a plaster statuette of the Infant Samuel on the top of the piano.
It was a standard loaf, containing eighty per cent. of the semolina, and it practically wiped the Infant Samuel out of existence. At the same moment, at his back, there sounded a loud, wrathful snort.
He spun round. The door was open, and at the other side of the table was standing a large, black-bearded, shirt-sleeved man, in an attitude rather reminiscent of Ajax defying the lightning. His hands trembled. His beard bristled. His eyes gleamed ferociously beneath enormous eyebrows. As Owen turned, he gave tongue in a voice like the discharge of a broadside.
"Stop it!"
Owen's mind, wrenched too suddenly from the dreamy future to the vivid present, was not yet completely under control. He gaped.
"Stop-that-infernal-noise!" roared the man.
He shot through the door, banging it after him, and pounded up the stairs.
Owen was annoyed. The artistic temperament was all very well, but there were limits. It was absurd that obscure authors should behave in this way. Prosser! Who on earth was Prosser? Had anyone ever heard of him? No! Yet here he was going about the country clipping small boys over the ear-hole, and flinging loaves of bread at bank-clerks as if he were Henry James or Marie Corelli. Owen reproached himself bitterly for his momentary loss of presence of mind. If he had only kept his head, he could have taken a flying shot at the man with the marmalade-pot. It had been within easy reach. Instead of which, he had merely stood and gaped. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been."
His manly regret was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Dorman with the information that the dog-cart was at the door.
Audrey was out of town when Owen arrived in London, but she returned a week later. The sound of her voice through the telephone did much to cure the restlessness from which he had been suffering since the conclusion of his holiday. But the thought that she was so near yet so inaccessible produced in him a meditative melancholy which enveloped him like a cloud that would not lift. His manner became distrait. He lost weight.
If customers were not vaguely pained by his sad, pale face, it was only because the fierce rush of modern commercial life leaves your business man little leisure for observing pallor in bank-clerks. What did pain them was the gentle dreaminess with which he performed his duties. He was in the Inward Bills Department, one of the features of which was the sudden inrush towards the end of each afternoon, of hatless, energetic young men with leather bags strapped to their left arms, clamouring for mysterious crackling documents, much fastened with pins. Owen had never quite understood what it was that these young men did want, and now his detached mind refused even more emphatically to grapple with the problem. He distributed the documents at random with the air of a preoccupied monarch scattering largess to the mob, and the subsequent chaos had to be handled by a wrathful head of the department in person.
Man's power of endurance is limited. At the end of the second week the overwrought head appealed passionately for relief, and Owen was removed to the Postage Department, where, when he had leisure from answering Audrey's telephone calls, he entered the addresses of letters in a large book and took them to the post. He was supposed also to stamp them, but a man in love cannot think of everything, and he was apt at times to overlook this formality.
One morning, receiving from one of the bank messengers the usual intimation that a lady wished to speak to him on the telephone, he went to the box and took up the receiver.
"Is that you, Owen? Owen, I went to White Roses last night. Have you been yet?"
"Not yet."
"Then you must go to-night. Owen, I'm certain you wrote it. It's perfectly lovely. I cried my eyes out. If you don't go to-night, I'll never speak to you again, even on the telephone. Promise."
"Must I?"
"Yes, you must. Why, suppose it is yours! It may mean a fortune. The stalls were simply packed. I'm going to ring up the theatre now and engage a seat for you, and pay for it myself."
"No-I say-" protested Owen.
"Yes, I shall. I can't trust you to go if I don't. And I'll ring up early to-morrow to hear all about it. Good- bye."
Owen left the box somewhat depressed. Life was quite gloomy enough as it was, without going out of one's way to cry one's eyes out over sentimental plays.
His depression was increased by the receipt, on his return to his department, of a message from the manager, stating that he would like to see Mr. Bentley in his private room for a moment. Owen never enjoyed these little chats with Authority. Out of office hours, in the circle of his friends, he had no doubt the manager was a delightful and entertaining companion; but in his private room his conversation was less enjoyable.
The manager was seated at his table, thoughtfully regarding the ceiling. His resemblance to a stuffed trout, always striking, was subtly accentuated, and Owen, an expert in these matters, felt that his fears
had been well founded-there was trouble in the air. Somebody had been complaining of him, and he was now about, as the phrase went, to be "run in."
A large man, seated with his back to the door, turned as he entered, and Owen recognized the well- remembered features of Mr. Prosser, the literary loaf-slinger.
Owen regarded him without resentment. Since returning to London he had taken the trouble of looking up his name in Who's Who? and had found that he was not so undistinguished as he had supposed. He was, it appeared, a Regius Professor and the author of some half-dozen works on sociology-a record, Owen felt, that almost justified loaf-flinging and ear-hole clipping in moments of irritation.
The manager started to speak, but the man of letters anticipated him.
"Is this the fool!" he roared. "Young man, I have no wish to be hard on a congenital idiot who is not responsible for his actions, but I must insist on an explanation. I understand that you are in charge of the correspondence in this office. Well, during the last week you have three times sent unstamped letters to my fiancée, Miss Vera Delane, Woodlands, Southbourne, Hants. What's the matter with you? Do you think she likes paying twopence a time, or what is it?"
Owen's mind leaped back at the words. They recalled something to him. Then he remembered.
He was conscious of a not unpleasant thrill. He had not known that he was superstitious, but for some reason he had not been able to get those absurd words of Mr. Dorman's mother out of his mind. And here was another prediction of hers, equally improbable, fulfilled to the latter.
"Great Scott!" he cried. "Are you going to be married?"
Mr. Prosser and the manager started simultaneously.
"Mrs. Dorman said you would be," said Owen. "Don't you remember?"
Mr. Prosser looked keenly at him.
"Why, I've seen you before," he said. "You're the young turnip-headed scallywag at the farm."
"That's right," said Owen.
"I've been wanting to meet you again. I thought the whole thing over, and it struck me," said Mr. Prosser, handsomely, "that I may have seemed a little abrupt at our last meeting."
"No, no."
"The fact is, I was in the middle of an infernally difficult passage of my book that morning, and when you began-"
"It was my fault entirely. I quite understand."
Mr. Prosser produced a card-case.
"We must see more of each other," he said. "Come and have a bit of dinner some night. Come to-night."
"I'm very sorry. I have to go to the theatre to-night."
"Then come and have a bit of supper afterwards. Excellent. Meet me at the Savoy at eleven-fifteen. I'm glad I didn't hit you with that loaf. Abruptness has been my failing through life. My father was just the same. Eleven-fifteen at the Savoy, then."