Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/52

 the cathedral towers. He walked up and down, hatless, and in his shirt sleeves. He felt that he wanted to rush round to Fletcher's Lane, and catch up Christopher and hold him.

"The one clean thing left to me," he thought.

His lips made a movement as of spitting.

"Good God! That a man should be left to die like that,—like a piece of rotting meat in a corner! If I should have to die like that? Damn her!"

He was in a fever to escape,—but how? Necessity held him chained. If he broke the chain and plunged? He was saving money, just a little money, and if he could win a breathing space he might have time to look about him. It was the boy who mattered. If he the man—surrendered—and allowed himself to be cajoled and to be devoured?

But why this niceness? How easy it would be for him. She had hinted so broadly. But his soul's exclamation was a "Pah!" To step into that poor sot's shoes, and to be pushed eventually over the edge of all decencies when the feline creature was tired of him.

No. He struggled. The nature of the struggle was vague and elemental, and he did not visualize it as one of those primitive crises in a man's life when something that is stronger than his mere appetites pushes him a step higher up the precipice. He clung to a prejudice, and to the one human thing that mattered. He was not going down into the dubious muck, and to feel himself smeared with it when he met the eyes of his boy.

"Damn her," he said, "I'll fight through," and he went back to the hotel with his eyes staring as they had stared at horrible moments during the war.

Sorrell's frenzy of activity continued. It seemed as though he were trying to lose himself in a desperate combat with the multifarious slovenliness of the Angel Inn, to hide himself in the dust cloud of his own energy. He was never still. He ran round and round in his cage, sweeping, polishing, tidying, carrying things. His indefatigable activity itself even upon the loungers in the "Cubby Hole."