‘Forgive my saying so, but sitting here and being just is much more warping. Life is pretty good purgatory, to all except about thirty per cent of grown-up people.’
Mr Danby smiled.
‘We simply couldn’t conduct our business, my dear young man, without scrupulous honesty in everybody. To make no distinction between honesty and dishonesty would be quite unfair. You know that perfectly well.’
‘I don’t know anything perfectly well, Mr Danby; and I mistrust those who say they do.’
‘Well, let us put it that there are rules of the game which must be observed, if society is to function at all.’
Desert smiled, too: ‘Oh! hang rules! Do it as a favour to me. I wrote the rotten book.’
No trace of struggle showed in Mr Danby’s face; but his deepset, close-together eyes shone a little.
‘I should be only too glad, but it’s a matter – well, of conscience, if you like. I’m not prosecuting the man. He must leave – that’s all.’
Desert shrugged his shoulders.
‘Well, good-bye!’ and he went out.
On the mat was Michael in two minds.
‘Well?’
‘No go. The old blighter’s too just.’
Michael stivered his hair.
‘Wait in my room five minutes while I let the poor beggar know, then I’ll come along.’
‘No,’ said Desert, ‘I’m going the other way.’
Not the fact that Wilfrid was going the other way – he almost always was – but something in the tone of his voice and the look on his face obsessed Michael’s imagination while he went downstairs to seek Bicket. Wilfrid was a rum chap – he went ‘dark’ so suddenly!
In the nether regions he asked:
‘Bicket gone?’
‘No, sir, there he is.’
There he was, in his shabby overcoat, with his pale narrow face, and his disproportionately large eyes, and his sloping shoulders.
‘Sorry, Bicket, Mr Desert has been in, but it’s no go.’
‘No, sir?’
‘Keep your pecker up, you’ll get something.’
‘I’m afryde not, sir. Well, I thank you very ’eartily; and I thank Mr Desert. Good night, sir; and good-bye!’
Michael watched him down the corridor, saw him waver into the dusky street.
‘Jolly!’ he said, and laughed.…
The natural suspicions of Michael and his senior partner that a tale was being pitched were not in fact justified. Neither the wife nor the pneumonia had been exaggerated; and wavering away in the direction of Blackfriars Bridge, Bicket thought not of his turpitude nor of how just Mr Danby had been, but of what he should say to her. He should not, of course, tell her that he had been detected in stealing; he must say he had ‘got the sack for cheeking the foreman’; but what would she think of him for doing that, when everything as it were depended on his not cheeking the foreman? This was one of those melancholy cases of such affection that he had been coming to his work day after day feeling as if he had ‘left half his guts’ behind him in the room where she lay, and when at last the doctor said to him:
‘She’ll get on now, but it’s left her very run down – you must feed her up,’ his anxiety had hardened into a resolution to have no more. In the next three weeks he had ‘pinched’ eighteen Copper Coins, including the five found in his overcoat. He had only ‘pitched on’ Mr Desert’s book because it was ‘easy sold’, and he was sorry now that he hadn’t pitched on someone else’s. Mr Desert had been very decent. He stopped at the corner of the Strand, and went over his money. With the two pounds given him by Michael and his wages he had seventy-five shillings in the world, and going into the Stores he bought a meat jelly and a tin of Benger’s food that could be made with water. With pockets bulging he took a bus, which dropped him at the corner of his little street on the Surrey side. His wife and he occupied the two ground floor rooms, at eight shillings a week, and he owed for three weeks. ‘Py that!’ he thought, ‘and have a roof until she’s well.’ It would help him over the news, too, to show her a receipt for the rent and some good food. How lucky they had been careful to have no baby! He sought the basement. His landlady was doing the week’s washing. She paused, in sheer surprise at such full and voluntary payment, and inquired after his wife.
‘Doing nicely, thank you.’
‘Well, I’m glad of that, it must be a relief to your mind.’
‘It is,’ said Bicket.
The landlady thought: ‘He’s a thread-paper – reminds me of a shrimp before you bile it, with those eyes.’
‘Here’s your receipt, and thank you. Sorry to ’ave seemed nervous about it, but times are ’ard.’