a very high and polished skull, beneath which his features, chubby as a child’s, seemed dwarfed into insignificance. He was dressed in a dark tweed suit with a stiff wing collar, which pushed the flesh of his chin up into a little pink roll. His hands were soft and white, and moved with delicate precision. On his watch chain he carried a curious emblem or charm, which led Belford to imagine that he might belong to some esoteric order. His hat, which he had taken off and laid on the bar, was a soft black felt, rather wide in the brim, and was the only part of his costume that departed in the least from the conventional. His voice was unusual, very soft and clear, with a kind of fluting sincerity.
‘… And, of course, it is not capitalism that is the trouble,’ he was saying. ‘One cannot permanently equalise the distribution of wealth. If only those who had the money knew how to spend it. But they don’t.’
Belford agreed.
‘Rich men are dull dogs, mostly,’ said the stranger. ‘They hoard unwisely and they spend unwisely. The curse of Midas, my dear sir, was lack of imagination. If I were to be given a million pounds tomorrow, I should know how to make it yield a million pounds’ worth of enjoyment. And so would you, would you not? If you were given a million pounds tomorrow—a hundred thousand, even—fifty thousand—’
‘By God!’ said Belford. ‘I could do with it.’ His sandwich was brought and he attacked it savagely. He found it good; curious and unexpected in flavour, but appetising.
The bald-headed man was talking again, but Belford interrupted him. He felt a violent need to unburden himself to somebody.
‘Look here,’ he said. ‘How would you like to be me? I’ve got to get twenty thousand in two months’ time or blow my brains out. I can’t get anything more out of the money-lenders—I’m dipped too far already. And there’s seventy-five thousand that belongs to me—that in justice and decency belongs to me—and I can’t lay hands on it. What do you think of that?’
‘That’s hard,’ said the stout man.
‘My wife’s ten years older than I am. I married her for her money; I admit it, and she knew it. What else would a man have married a plain and sickly middle-aged woman for? Mind you, I did my bit of the bargain. It wasn’t my fault if the kid died and my wife turned into a permanent invalid. Why should she grudge me the very smell of her money? The income’s all right and helps to keep the place going, but if I even suggest she might lend me—lend me a few thousands of the capital—you’d think I was asking for her life.’
The stout man nodded sympathetically and interjected an order to the barman.
‘You’d better have one of these too,’ he added. ‘They’re another speciality. They’re not for the suburban palate, but they’d cheer up a five-year-old corpse.’
Belford said: ‘All right,’ and drink was put down before him. He lifted his glass and said, ‘Here’s how.’ The stuff was queer, certainly—intensely bitter with fire beneath the bitterness. He was not sure if he liked it. He took it down quickly, like medicine.
‘She says it will come to me when she dies, but what’s the good of that? Creaking doors hang the longest. I’ve got to have money somehow. I daresay I was an ass to speculate, but it’s done now and I can’t undo it.’ He bit savagely at his upper lip. ‘Speculation—if she knew what I needed it for, she’d leave the stuff to a cats’ home. She’s religious. Religious! Let her husband go to prison rather than—’
He checked himself.
‘Mind you, I don’t say it’s come to that. But what does she want the money for? What good’s it to her? Missionary societies and doctors’ stuff— that’s all she gets out of it. That’s a pretty wife for a man, isn’t it? What am I to her? A cross between a male nurse and an errand boy, that’s all. Forced to kowtow for fear of being cut out of her will. Running about with pills and potions and getting up at night to fill hot water bottles. Five hundred a year would give her all she wants—and she’s worth seventy-five thousand.’
‘What’s the nature of her illness?’
‘Damned if I know. Her doctor—oily hand I call him—gives a long name to it. Something to do with the kidneys or the spleen or something. And nerves, of course. They all have nerves nowadays. Also insomnia and all the rest of it. One of these damned tablets every blessed night in the year—not drug-taking, of course, oh, dear no! My wife is a religious woman. She wouldn’t take drugs. Only a harmless pill to ensure natural sleep.’
He dragged the little bottle of veronal from his pocket and flung it on the bar counter. His head felt queer and he was conscious of a curious sensation of interior lightness, as though he were losing touch with realities. He realised dimly that he was talking too much. That odd cocktail must have been pretty potent.
The stranger smiled.
‘Not altogether so harmless,’ he said. ‘One might easily take an overdose of that. She probably will one day. They often do, you know.’
‘Think so?’ said Belford. ‘But she’d go to hell for that, you know. Straight to hell. “Where their worm dieth not”.’ He laughed. ‘Worms, eh? That’s a nice thing to think about.’
The stranger leaned towards him. Belford became intensely, seriously aware of his face, with every detail, every line, every tiny pore of the skin marked and individualised, like the pen strokes on a map. It was not a face—it was a continent. It was as wide as Asia, and he was an explorer upon its vast and uninhabited surface. For endless aeons he had been marching along its waste expanse, pitted with holes, ribbed with gullies. He stood at the mouth of a dark cavern, filled with trees, smooth and cylindrical, like hairs. He peered into it, as he had peered since the beginning of time, whose huge heartbeats he heard—tick tock, tick tock—incredible ages apart. Yet all around him the stealthy life of the restaurant went on. The barman was measuring a rainbow cocktail—pink, green, yellow—Belford suddenly realised the intense, the anxious importance of the comparative weight of liquids. Atoms, molecules, heating upward against the furious downward pressure of gravity. If the pink were to overflow into the green, the universe would be flung into chaos. He saw the bleak immensity of space, peopled by whirling planets over innumerable millions of miles, and all dependent upon that pink and green and yellow pinpoint—the ultimate focus of creation. He laughed. It was funny, it was enough to split your sides that he, and he only, should be in possession of that stupendous secret.
‘Two months.’ The stranger’s voice floated over the abyss, clear as water. ‘She will take an overdose before the two months are up. We can ensure that much for you, you know.’
The car sped through street after street, where swarms of men and women swam past like sea-creatures in a tank. At every bump it rose like a ship, riding huge combers. They were moving fast, they were racing at the speed of light. One hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. He could watch time spinning backwards, like a cinematograph film reeled out the wrong way. Yet nothing was blurred in their headlong flight. Lamp-post succeeded lamp-post, each one rigid as a soldier on parade, each one with its own mysterious character and importance. His companion was seated beside him, his face averted. He loomed gigantic, his shoulders had the exuberant mass of a sleeping elephant. Belford could hear the billowing outline of his back, like a symphony. It rolled out in striding harmonies. A persistent and birdlike trilling puzzled Belford for a moment, till he traced it to an artificial flower in a silver holder beside him. He felt feverish.
‘It’s rather hot, isn’t it?’ he said.
The stranger put down the window immediately. The air, rushing in, was cool and invigorating, like river water at dawn. Belford was filled with an utter peace and confidence. He had never before seen the beauty of the world so clearly. The smooth leather of the car’s upholstery was a caress to his fingertips. He felt it slowly, luxuriously. It dipped to a hollow, held down by a round button. The exquisite significance of that button penetrated him with an inward ecstasy. He could feel the sense-processes and the thought-processes working swiftly and surely within him. The nerves sent up their urgent message, tingling along his arm. He felt the