Results of Rain

When the lunch was completely finished and the grill-room had so far emptied that it was inhabited by no one except themselves and several waiters who were trying to force them to depart by means of thought transference and uneasy, hovering round their table, Priam Farll began to worry his brains in order to find some sane way of spending the afternoon in her society.  He wanted to keep her, but he did not know how to keep her.  He was quite at a loss.  Strange that a man great enough and brilliant enough to get buried in Westminster Abbey had not sufficient of the small change of cleverness to retain the company of a Mrs. Alice Challice!  Yet so it was.  Happily he was buoyed up by the thought that she understood.

“I must be moving off home,” she said, putting her gloves on slowly; and sighed.

“Let me see,” he stammered.  “I think you said Werter Road, Putney?”

“Yes.  No. 29.”

“Perhaps you’ll let me call on you,” he ventured.

“Oh, do!” she encouraged him.

Nothing could have been more correct, and nothing more banal, than this part of their conversation.  He certainly would call.  He would travel down to the idyllic Putney to-morrow.  He could not lose such a friend, such a balm, such a soft cushion, such a comprehending intelligence.  He would bit by bit become intimate with her, and perhaps ultimately he might arrive at the stage of being able to tell her who he was with some chance of being believed.  Anyhow, when he did call—­and he insisted to himself that it should be extremely soon—­he would try another plan with her; he would carefully decide beforehand just what to say and how to say it.  This decision reconciled him somewhat to a temporary parting from her.

So he paid the bill, under her sagacious, protesting eyes, and he managed to conceal from those eyes the precise amount of the tip; and then, at the cloak-room, he furtively gave sixpence to a fat and wealthy man who had been watching over his hat and stick. (Highly curious, how those common-sense orbs of hers made all such operations seem excessively silly!) And at last they wandered, in silence, through the corridors and antechambers that led to the courtyard entrance.  And through the glass portals Priam Farll had a momentary glimpse of the reflection of light on a cabman’s wet macintosh.  It was raining.  It was raining very heavily indeed.  All was dry under the glass-roofed colonnades of the courtyard, but the rain rattled like kettledrums on that glass, and the centre of the courtyard was a pond in which a few hansoms were splashing about.  Everything—­the horses’ coats, the cabmen’s hats and capes, and the cabmen’s red faces, shone and streamed in the torrential summer rain.  It is said that geography makes history.  In England, and especially in London, weather makes a good deal of history.  Impossible to brave that rain, except under the severest pressure of necessity!  They were in shelter, and in shelter they must remain.