‘Did he seem upset?’ I asked.

‘He certainly couldn’t talk of anything else.’

‘Look what you’ve done, Thomas Henry! You can’t say you weren’t warned.’

‘No, but it may have given him an object in life. He was much more animated than he used to be.’

The next time we met, Thomas Henry was less optimistic. ‘He’s been down there again,’ he said, without bothering to explain who ‘he’ was, ‘and she isn’t there. He told me he thought I’d made a mistake, because he wasn’t a good draughtsman, and what he drew corresponded to something inside him, not outside (he didn’t mention Mary). He said that each line had a special meaning for him, and any deviation from it, in a human face, made that face quite unlike the face of his conception. And yet he couldn’t help thinking that I might be right, and that one day she might come back, and he would find her. “She may be ill,” he said, “or one of her relations may be ill. In the working-classes, some relation or other is nearly always ill”—you know the way he talks about the working-classes, as if they were another type of human being.’

‘They are,’ I said.

‘Oh, nonsense. But I do think we should do something for him—he can’t go on like this, commuting between here and Restbourne like a . . . like a . . .’

‘Shuttle on a loom,’ I said. ‘Well, you do something, Thomas Henry, it’s your pigeon. Vous l’avez voulu, Georges Dandin.’

‘Yes, I felt for him more than you did. I saw a fellow creature suffering, and wanted to relieve him. Whereas you——’

‘Passed by on the other side.’

‘It’s nothing to be proud of. But now you can do something to rid him of his obsession. You can go down to Restbourne, Ernest, and find out what’s happened to her.’

‘Why not you? I’m not specially keen on the south coast in August.’

‘Because you talked to her, and made yourself conspicuous, as no doubt they all remember in the café. You might even pose as a relation.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘One of the sick ones, perhaps.’

‘Oh, do go, Ernest. You’re a man of independent means. It’s much easier for you. You don’t have to be in any special place at any special time, so why not go to Restbourne?’

‘Restbourne is the last place I want to go to,’ I replied. But in the end I went.

The appalling vulgarity of that town! Nowhere has the proletarianization of the English race gone so fast, or so far, as it has at Restbourne. It is the apotheosis of the synthetic. I dreaded it, and when I got there it was worse than I remembered—an exhibition of what was, to my middle-class mind, a substitute for every form of pleasure. Not that it was not expensive, for it was; everyone seemed to have money to burn. But how joyless that sometimes gay proceeding made them! How they trailed about on the sea-front, well fed, well dressed (so far as they were dressed), well tanned, well oiled (sometimes in both senses of the word), but among the lot not one whom a photographer, still less a biographer, would ever want to make his subject.

It was a relief to sit down in the Krazie Café, for a chair is a chair, and tiredness is tiredness, whatever a mass-produced consciousness may have done to take the reality out of most objects and sensations. She wasn’t there, Doris Blackmore wasn’t there: I saw that at a glance; and the full weight of five hours thrown away, and five pounds thrown away on railway-trains and taxis, fell on me so crushingly that I groaned aloud. And sharpening my general disappointment was a particular one which I couldn’t or wouldn’t account for then. Deep down in me I had hoped to see the waitress. Why? To bandy words with her? To let her know where she got off, or didn’t get off? I couldn’t tell. But my sense of grievance was so overwhelming and acute that I did what, coming down in the train, I hadn’t thought possible—for me, at any rate. With a clear conscience, which for some reason mine wasn’t, it should have been quite easy; just a few words, casually uttered, as if the inquiry was the most natural in the world, and the thing would have been done. But in the train, however often I rehearsed them, whatever accent of indifference I gave them, they would not pass my lips. Now I knew they would, and when I had paid my bill I went up to the woman who seemed to be in charge and said:

‘Can you tell me what’s become of the waitress, Doris Blackmore I think her name was, who used to be here?’

At that the woman’s face stiffened and she said shortly:

‘I’m afraid I can’t. She left us at a few days’ notice. Naturally, we did not pay her her week’s wages.’

‘How long ago was that?’

‘Over a month, I think. She said she was fed up, and she was earning good money, too. They’re all alike—you can’t rely on them. A whim, a fancied slight, a boy, you never know what it is, and then they’re off.’

‘A pity,’ I said. ‘She seemed to be a nice girl.’

The manageress pursed her lips and shrugged.

‘No nicer than the rest. They’re spoilt, if you ask me.’

‘And you don’t know where she’s gone?’

‘I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.’

Well, that was that. My next step was to tell Thomas Henry (who was going to pretend that he had made the journey down to Restbourne) to tell Edward that the Face had been, well, effaced. Useless to look for it; better forget about it. And this he did, assuring Edward, who didn’t want to be convinced, that any further raids on Restbourne would be fruitless. Fruitless for me, too, I reflected. The incident rankled like a sore place that hurts and is desired, as Cleopatra said, not only for its own sake but for the contrast with the healthy tissues round it.

At that time I had a flat in Knightsbridge overlooking Hyde Park and it was my nightly custom, for the sake of my health, to take a brisk constitutional in the Park before retiring. Between Hyde Park Corner and Wellington Barracks was my usual beat, but it was not only my beat, I shared it with a great many others who were not there for their health. Some sat, some stood, some walked, some drove up or drove away in motor-cars that seemed to hug the kerbstone in a peculiarly intimate manner and in some way—perhaps by exuding a moral cloud—to darken the surrounding air. I won’t say anything against them for fear I should offend the live-and-let-live spirit of high-minded persons; but walking by them I had to run a gauntlet of hullos, dearies, darlings, and other forms of affectionate solicitation, and I got very tired of it. Indeed, but for a certain obstinacy, and the feeling that the Park was mine as well as theirs, I should have bent my steps another way.

When accosted I had not, as some men have, a polite formula of refusal ready: I swerved or dodged or walked straight on. But one evening I couldn’t, for my solicitrix, who had risen from a seat a few yards farther on, planted herself in front of me and blocked my way.

‘Hello, darling,’ she said.

If her face hadn’t been almost touching mine I should have recognized her sooner. If I had been less put out I should have recognized her sooner.

‘Doris Blackmore!’ I said at last.

‘The same,’ she answered. ‘I’ve seen you several times doing your nightly dozen, or whatever you were here for, so I thought, “Why not me as well as one of the others?” ’

‘I don’t come here to pick up women,’ I said.

‘I thought not, but one can’t be sure, I haven’t had much experience you see. Even the older ones can’t always tell.’

‘They can’t, indeed,’ I said.

‘No need to be snooty. You might be wanting something—other men do.’

I made no answer.

‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘yours is the first face I’ve recognized since I’ve been on the game.’

‘On the game?’

‘Well, on the batter, hustling, there are lots of names for it.’

‘I could say the same,’ I said. ‘Yours is the first face that I’ve recognized among your crowd.’