He supposed that he must accept Rankin’s invitation to dine.  Except for his hunger, which made the prospect of dining so unique and great a thing, he had no reason for refusing.  Rankin had reckoned on a scruple, and removed the ground of it.  He knew that there was no approaching Rickman as long as there remained the shadow of an assumption that the explanation should have come from him.

The invitation had arrived just in time, before Rickman had sent the last saleable remnants of his wardrobe to the place where his dress-suit had gone before.  He would have to apologize to Mrs. Rankin for its absence, but his serge suit was still presentable, for he had preserved it with much care, and there was one clean unfrayed shirt in his drawer.

But when Sunday came, the first febrile excitement of anticipation was succeeded by the apathy of an immense fatigue, and at the back of it all a loathsome sense of the positive indecency of his going.  It was hunger that was driving him, the importunate hunger of many months, apparent in his lean face and shrunken figure.  And after all could any dinner be worth the pain of dressing for it?  When at the last moment he discovered a loose button on his trousers, he felt that there was no motive, no power on earth that could urge him to the task of securing it.  And when it broke from its thread and fell, and hid itself under the skirting board in a sort of malignant frenzy, he took its behaviour as a sign that he would do well to forego that dinner at Rankin’s.  He had hardly acquiesced in this decision when reason reasserted itself and told him that everything depended on that dinner and that the dinner depended on the button; therefore that in all God’s universe there was nothing so important, so essential to him as that button.  He went down on his knees and dislodged the button with a penknife, after an agonizing search.  He sat feebly on the edge of his bed, and with many sad, weak blasphemies bowed himself to a miserable, ignominious struggle.  All malign and adverse fortunes seemed to be concentrated in the rolling, slippery, ungovernable thing.

The final victory was his, such a victory as amounted to a resurgence of the spiritual will.

CHAPTER LXX

All things seemed to work together to create an evening of misunderstanding rather than of reconciliation.  To begin with he arrived at the Rankins’ half an hour after the time appointed.  Rankin lived in Sussex Square, which seemed to him an interminably long way off.  The adventure with the trouser button, and a certain dizziness which precluded all swift and decided movement, would have been enough to make him late, even if he had not miscalculated the distance between Hyde Park and Bloomsbury.

He had also miscalculated the distance between Rankin the junior journalist and Rankin the celebrity.  Rankin had achieved celebrity in a way he had not meant.  There was a time when even Jewdwine was outdone by the young men of The Planet in honest contempt for the taste and judgement of the many; when it had been Rankin’s task to pursue with indefatigable pleasantry the figures of popular renown.  And now he was popular himself.  The British public had given to him its fatal love.