As he sat there listening there seemed to come up to him, straight out of the river, strange impersonal noises that had to do with no definite sounds. He was reminded of a story that he had once read, a story concerning a nice young man who caught the disease known as the Horror of London. Peter thought that in the air, coming from nowhere, intangible, floating between the river and the sky something stirred....

Big Ben struck quarter to four and he turned once more into the Strand.

The editor of _The Saturday Illustrated_ was a very different person from Mr. Boset. At a desk piled with papers, stern, gaunt and sharp-chinned, his words rattled out of his mouth like peas onto a plate. But Peter saw that he had humorous twinkling eyes.

"Well, what can you do?"

"I've never tried anything--but I feel that I should learn--"

"Learn! Do you suppose this office is a nursery shop for teaching sucklings how to draw their milk? Are you ready for anything?"

"Anything--"

"Yes--they all say that. Journalism isn't any fun, you know."

"I'm not looking for fun."

"Well, it's the damnedest trade out. Anything's better. But you want to write?"

"I must."

"Yes--exactly. Well, I like the look of you. More blood and bones than most of the rotten puppies that come into this office. I've no job for you at the moment though. Go back to your digs and write something--anything you like--and send it along--leave me your address.

Oh, ho! Bucket Lane--hard up?"

"I'm all right, thank you."

"All right, I wasn't offering you charity--no need to put your pride up.

I shan't forget you ... but send me something."

The clouds had now enveloped the sun. As Peter, a little encouraged by this last experience but tired with a dull, listless fatigue, crept into the dark channels of Bucket Lane, the rain began to fall with heavy solemn drops.

CHAPTER VII

DEVIL'S MARCH

I

There could be nothing odder than the picture that Brockett's and Bennett Square presented from the vantage ground of Bucket Lane. How peaceful and happy those evenings (once considered a little dreary perhaps and monotonous) now seemed! Those mornings in the dusty bookshop, Mr. Zanti, Herr Gottfried, Mrs. Brockett, then Brockett's with its strange kind-hearted company--the dining-room, the marble pillars, the green curtains--Norah Monogue!

Not only did it seem another lifetime when he had been there but also inevitably, one was threatened with never getting back. Bucket Lane was another world--from its grimy windows one looked upon every tragedy that life had to offer. Into its back courts were born muddled indecent little lives, there blindly to wallow until the earth called them back to itself again.

But it was in the attitude of Bucket Lane to the Great Inevitable that the essential difference was to be observed. In Bennett Square things had been expected and, for the most part, obtained. Catastrophes came lumbering into their midst at times but rising in the morning one might decently expect to go to rest at night in safety. In Bucket Lane there was no safety but defiance--fierce, bitterly humorous, truculent defiance. Bucket Lane was a beleaguered army that stood behind the grime and dirty walls on guard. From the earliest moment there the faces of all the babies born into Bucket Lane caught the strain of cautious resistance that was always to remain with them. Life in Bucket Lane, for every one from the youngest infant to the oldest idiot, was War. War against Order and Civilised Force. War also against that great unseen Hand that might at any moment swoop down upon any one of them and bestow fire, death and imprisonment upon its victims. To the ladies and gentlemen from the Mission the citizens of Bucket Lane presented an amused and cynical tolerance. If those poor, meek, frightened creatures chose some faint-hearted attempts at flattery and submission before this abominable Deity--well, they did no harm.

Mrs. Williams said to Miss Connacher, a bright-faced young woman from St. Matthew's Mission--"And I'm sure we're always delighted to see you, Miss. But you can't 'ave us goin' and being grateful on our bended knees to the sort of person as according to your account of it gave me my first 'usband 'oo was a blackguard if ever there was one, and my last child wot 'ad rickets and so 'andsomely arranged me to go breakin' my leg one night coming back from a party and sliding on the stairs, and in losin' my little bit o' charin' and as near the workus as ever yer see--no--it ain't common sense."

To which Miss Connacher vaguely looking around for a list of Mrs.

Williams' blessings and finding none to speak of, had no reply.

But the astonishing thing was that Peter seemed at once to be seized with the Bucket Lane position. He was now, he understood, in a world of earthquake--wise citizens lived from minute to minute and counted on no longer safety. He began also to eliminate everything that was not absolutely essential. At Brockett's he had never consciously done without anything that he wanted--in Bucket Lane he discarded to the last possible shred of possession.

He had returned from his first day's hunting with the resolve that before he ventured out again he would have something to show. With a precious sixpence he bought a copy of _The Mascot_ and studied it--there was a short story entitled "Mrs. Adair's Co."--and an article on "What Society Drinks"--the remaining pages of the number were filled with pictures and "Chatter from Day to Day." This gaily-coloured production lying on one of the beds in the dark room in Bucket Lane seemed singularly out of place. Its pages fluttered in the breeze that came through the window cracks--"Maison Tep" it cried feebly to the screaming children in the court below, "is a very favourite place for supper just now, with Maitre Savori as its popular chef and its admirably stocked cellars...."

Peter gave himself a fortnight in which to produce something that he could "show." Stephen meanwhile had found work as a waiter in one of the small Soho restaurants; it was only a temporary engagement but he hoped to get something better within a week or two.

For the moment all was well. At the end of his fortnight, with four things written Peter meant to advance once more to the attack. Meanwhile he sat with a pen, a penny bottle of ink and an exercise book and did what he could. At the end of the fortnight he had written "The Sea Road," an essay for which Robert Louis Stevenson was largely responsible, "The Redgate Mill," a story of the fantastic, terrible kind, "Stones for Bread," moralising on Bucket Lane, and the "Red-Haired Boy," a somewhat bitter reminiscence of Dawson's. Of this the best was undoubtedly "The Sea Road," but in his heart of hearts Peter knew that there was something the matter with all of them. "Reuben Hallard" he had written because he had to write it, these four things he had written because he ought to write them ... difference sufficient. Nevertheless, he put them into halfpenny wrappes and sent them away.

In the struggle to produce these things he had not found that fortnight wearisome. Before him, every day, there was the evening when Stephen would return, to which he might look forward. Stephen was always very late--often it was two o'clock before he came in, but they had a talk before going to sleep. And here in these evenings Stephen developed in the most wonderful way, developed because Peter had really never known him before.

Stephen had never appeared to Peter as a character at all. In the early days Peter had been too young. Stephen had, at that time, been simply something to be worshipped, without any question or statement. Now that worshipping had gone and the space that it left had to be filled by some new relationship, something that could only come slowly, out of the close juxtaposition that living together in Bucket Lane had provided.

And it was Stephen who found, unconsciously and quite simply, the shape and colour of Peter's idea of him. Peter had in reality, nothing at all to do with it, and had Stephen been a whit more self-conscious the effect would have been spoiled.

In the first place Peter came quite freshly to the way that Stephen looked. Stephen expressed nothing, consciously, with his body; it was wonderful indeed considering its size and strength, the little that he managed to do with it. His eyes were mild and amiable, his face largely covered with a deep brown beard, once wildly flowing, now sharply pointed. He was at least six foot four in height, the breadth of shoulder was tremendous, but although he knew admirably what to do with it as a means of conveyance, of sheer physical habit, he had no conception of the possibilities that it held as the expression of his soul. That soul was to be found, by those who cared to look for it, glancing from his eyes, struggling sometimes through the swift friendliness of his smile--but he gave it no invitation. It all came, perhaps, from the fact that he treated himself--if anything so unconscious may be called treatment--as the very simplest creature alive. The word introspection meant nothing to him whatever, there were in life certain direct sharp motives and on these he acted. He never thought of himself or of any one else in terms of complexity; the body acted simply through certain clear and direct physical laws ... so the spirit. He loved the woman who had dominated his whole life and one day he would find her and marry her. He loved Peter as he would love a son of his own if he possessed one, and he would be at Peter's side so long as Peter needed him, and would rather be there than anywhere else. For the rest life was a matter of birth and death, of loving one man and hating another, of food and drink, and--but this last uncertainly--of some strange thrill that was stirred in him, at times, by certain sights and sounds.

He was glad to have been born ... he would be quite ready to die. He did not question the reason of the one state or the other. For the very fact that life was so simple and unentangled he clung, with the tenacity and dumb force of an animal to the things that he had. Peter felt, vaguely, from time to time, the strength with which Stephen held to him. It was never expressed in word nor in action but it came leaping sometimes, like fire, into the midst of their conversation--it was never tangible--always illusive.

To Peter's progress this simplicity of Stephen was of vast importance.

The boy had now reached an age and a period where emotions, judgments, partialities, conclusions and surmises were fighting furiously for dominion. His seven years at Brockett's had been, introspectively, of little moment. He had been too busy discovering the things that other people had discovered and written down to think very much about himself.

Now released from the domination of books, he plunged into a whirlpool of surmise about himself. During the fortnight that he sat writing his articles in Bucket Lane he flew, he sank, according to his moods. It seemed to him that as soon as he had decided on one path and set out eagerly to follow it others crossed it and bewildered him.

He was now on that unwholesome, absorbing, thrilling, dangerous path of self-discovery. Opposed to this was the inarticulate, friendly soul of Stephen. Stephen understood nothing and at the same time understood everything. Against the testing of his few simple laws Peter's complexities often vanished ... but vanished only to recur again, unsatisfied, demanding a subtler answer. It was during those days, through all the trouble and even horror that so shortly came upon them both, that Stephen realised with a dull, unreasoned pain, like lead at the heart, that Peter was passing inevitably from him into a country whither Stephen could not follow--to deal with issues that Stephen could not, in any kind of way, understand. Stephen realised this many days before Peter even dimly perceived it, and the older man by the love that he had for the boy whom he had known from the very first period of his growth was enabled, although dimly, to see beyond, above all these complexities, to a day when Peter would once more, having learnt and suffered much in the meanwhile, come back to that first simplicity.

But that day was far distant.

II

On the evening of the day on which Peter finished the last of his five attempts to take the London journals by storm Stephen returned from his restaurant earlier than usual--so early indeed, that Peter, had he not been so bent on his own immediate affairs, must have noticed and questioned it. He might, too, have observed that Stephen, now and again, shot an anxious, troubled glance at him as though he were uneasy about something.

But Peter, since six o'clock that evening, at which moment he had written the concluding sentence of "The Sea Road," had been in deep and troubled thought concerning himself, and broke from that introspection, on Stephen's arrival, in a state of unhappy morbidity and entire self-absorption.

Their supper was beer, sardines and cheese.

"It's been pretty awful here this evening," Peter said. "Old Trubbit on the floor below's been beating his wife and she's been screaming like anything. I couldn't stand it, after a bit, and went down to see what I could do. The family was mopping her head with water and he was sitting on a chair, crying. Drunk again, of course, but he was turned off his job apparently this afternoon. They're closing down."

"'Ard luck," said Stephen, looking at the floor.

"Yes--it hasn't been altogether cheerful--and his getting the chuck like that set me thinking. It's awfully lucky you've got your job all right and of course now I've written these things and have got 'something to show,' I'll be all right." Peter paused for a moment a little uncertainly. "But it does, you know, make one a bit frightened, this place, seeing the way people get suddenly bowled over. There were the Gambits--a fortnight ago he was in work and they were as fit as anything ... they haven't had any food now for three days."

"There ain't anything to be frightened about," Stephen said slowly.

"No, I know. But Stephen, suppose I _don't_ get work, after all. I've been so confident all this time, but I mightn't be able to do the job a bit.... I suppose this place is getting on my nerves but--I could get awfully frightened if I let myself."