Page:Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1951-03).djvu/7

 St. Paul's Station, opposite the venerable red-brick building of The Times.

I had two coppers from my ten shillings left. In similar straits Herman Melville, sailor and mystic, flung his last penny into the sea. There is no sea in London, but lights and shadows floated over Blackfriars Bridge, and I could have dropped my last coins from the river parapet there. And I once read a story in which someone spent his last twopence on a ticket for the Tube.

■ neither of these things. Walking slowly across the road beneath the railway bridge, I stopped 5 a passing newspaper boy and spent a penny on an evening paper which I didn't want. What were starting prices or the winner of the first race at Newmarket to me? Tucking the paper unread beneath my arm, I strolled leisurely along the pavement to the offices of The Times. Standing there, I casually scanned the advertisement sheets from the day's issue of the paper, displayed on a board for the benefit of unemployed in quest of work.

Many times had I done this before, but without result. Perhaps I was not sufficiently an early bird, for when I set out after vacancies thus displayed, I always arrived too late. That, of course, was the fault of myself, and not of The Times. Therefore it seemed folly on my part to look at the advertisement sheets at that hour of the afternoon. Nevertheless I went through them, with a conscientious eye. Nothing. I was turning away again when my eye was caught by an advertisement at the bottom of a column which I had overlooked. It ran:

": Wanted Immediately, for the country, young, single, and untraveled Englishman. Apply personally, after noon, Trusibond, 26a Gray's Inn Buildings, Gray's Inn Court."

It was not the singular wording of this advertisement which made me read and read it again. One might have thought that a traveled driver was always to be preferred to an untraveled one, but I had long since learned to look with a tolerant eye on the whims of employers and their different ways. The consideration which weighed with me and kept me standing there was whether it was worth my while to make an application for the job.

I had had my own car before the war, and two years as an officer of the Tanks Corps in France had given me a fairly decent knowledge of the mechanics of cars and motor-engines and similar things. But was it the slightest use? Previous applications for such jobs on my part had always been turned down because of my lack of a chauffeur's credentials, and it was now getting on for four o'clock.

The thought of my penniless condition decided me. There was no reason why I should not call and ask if the post had been filled. Of my ten shillings a penny remained, and how could I expend it more providentially than in a fare to look for work? That reflection was final. I went along New Bridge Street to Ludgate Circus, and caught the first bus for Gray's Inn Road.

I went past that thoroughfare and into High Holborn looking for the familiar entrance to the Inn. And when I saw it, I dropped off the bus.

Was ever modern fortune sought by more mediaeval way than the narrow old passage which runs beside the wine-vault from High Holborn to Gray's Inn? I knew the passage well. In my legal days I had used it often enough, and had sometimes gone at the luncheon hour to the ancient vault at the corner, where law clerks and other small legal fry gathered for sherry and sandwiches among great wine casks and the odour of wine in a dim, dark room. In a changeful age the law still remains faithful to its taste for wine.

The place seemed the same as I passed it: the serious, wine-sipping figures within; the great fire burning for the .temperature of the wine in the cellars below. As for that, I suppose it has looked the same any time for two hundred or more years past.

By the side of it, I went down the