“How much are we paying Farrow, Mr. Simpson?”

“Twenty-five shillings, sir.”

“Twenty-seven and sixpence.”

And he walked on before Sam could express his gratitude. Better was to come, for an envelope was handed to him when he went to collect his money at the end of the week. In it were three sovereigns and a card saying, “Bonus for zeal and invention.”

Now, only nine months later, his salary had risen to the giddy heights of thirty-two and sixpence; and he had a strong suspicion, since he had become an indispensable member of the window-dressing staff, that any time he asked for a rise he would get it.

Sam bought himself another and extraordinary supplement of gin and returned to his seat. The unhappy thing about him—a defect that his modern descendants in the publicity game have managed to get free of—was that he had a conscience… or perhaps he had simply a feeling of unjustified happiness and good luck. The Faust myth is archetypal in civilized man; never mind that Sam’s civilization had not taught him enough even to know who Faust was, he was sufficiently sophisticated to have heard of pacts with the Devil and of the course they took. One did very well for a while, but one day the Devil would claim his own. Fortune is a hard taskmaster; it stimulates the imagination into foreseeing its loss, and in strict relation, very often, to its kindness.

And it worried him, too, that he had never told Mary of what he had done. There were no other secrets between them; and he trusted her judgment. Every now and again his old longing to be his own master in his own shop would come back to him; was there not now proof of his natural aptitude? But it was Mary, with her sound rural sense of the best field to play, who gently—and once or twice, not so gently—sent him back to his Oxford Street grindstone.

Even if it was hardly yet reflected in their accents and use of the language, these two were rising in the world; and knew it. To Mary, it was all like a dream. To be married to a man earning over thirty shillings a week! When her own father, the carter, had never risen above ten! To live in a house that cost £19 a year to rent!

And, most marvelous of all, to have recently been able to interview eleven lesser mortals for a post one had, only two years before, occupied oneself! Why eleven? Mary, I am afraid, thought a large part of playing the mistress was being hard to please—a fallacy in which she copied the niece rather than the aunt. But then she also followed a procedure not unknown among young wives with good-looking young husbands. Her selection of a skivvy had been based very little on intelligence and efficiency; and very much on total unattractiveness. She told Sam she finally offered Harriet the six pounds a year because she felt sorry for her; it was not quite a lie.

When he returned home to his mutton stew, that evening of the double ration of gin, he put his arm round the swollen waist and kissed its owner; then looked down at the flower mosaic brooch she wore between her breasts—always wore at home and always took off when she went out, in case some thief garrotted her for it.

“’Ow’s the old pearl and coral then?”

She smiled and held it up a little.

“Happy to know ‘ee, Sam.”

And they stayed there, staring down at the emblem of their good fortune; always deserved, in her case; and now finally to be paid for, in his.

And what of Charles? I pity any detective who would have had to dog him through those twenty months. Almost every city in Europe saw him, but rarely for long. The pyramids had seen him; and so had the Holy Land. He saw a thousand sights, and sites, for he spent time also in Greece and Sicily, but unseeingly; they were no more than the thin wall that stood between him and nothingness, an ultimate vacuity, a total purposelessness. Wherever he stopped more than a few days, an intolerable lethargy and melancholia came upon him. He became as dependent on traveling as an addict on his opium. Usually he traveled alone, at most with some dragoman or courier-valet of the country he was in. Very occasionally he took up with other travelers and endured their company for a few days; but they were almost always French or German gentlemen. The English he avoided like the plague; a whole host of friendly fellow countrymen received a drench of the same freezing reserve when they approached him.

Paleontology, now too emotionally connected with the events of that fatal spring, no longer interested him. When he had closed down the Kensington house, he had allowed the Geological Museum to take the pick of his collection; the rest he had given to students. His furniture had been stored; Montague was told to offer the lease of the Belgravia house anew when it fell in. Charles would never live in it.

He read much, and kept a journal of his travels; but it was an exterior thing, about places and incidents, not about his own mind—a mere way of filling time in the long evenings in deserted khans and alberghi. His only attempt to express his deeper self was in the way of verse, for he discovered in Tennyson a greatness comparable with that of Darwin in his field. The greatness he found was, to be sure, not the greatness the age saw in the Poet Laureate. Maud, a poem then almost universally despised—considered quite unworthy of the master—became Charles’s favorite; he must have read it a dozen times, and parts of it a hundred. It was the one book he carried constantly with him. His own verse was feeble in comparison; he would rather have died than show it to anyone else. But here is one brief specimen just to show how he saw himself during his exile.

And to get the taste of that from your mouth, let me quote a far greater poem—one he committed to heart, and one thing he and I could have agreed on: perhaps the noblest short poem of the whole Victorian era.