Because of my confidence in her, and my resentment of the proprietary qualms of Roger and Miss Meikeljohn, I accepted her attitude; and was correspondingly shocked when the actual day came.

Roger telephoned to me at breakfast time. “The baby’s begun.”

“Good,” I said.

“What d’you mean, good?”

“Well, it is good, isn’t it? When did it start?”

“Last night, about an hour after you left.”

“It ought to be over soon.”

“I suppose so. Shall I come round?”

He came, yawning a great deal from having been up all night. “I was with her for an hour or two. I always imagined people in bed when they were having babies. Lucy’s up, going about the house. It was horrible. Now she doesn’t want me.”

“What happened exactly?”

He began to tell me and then I was sorry I had asked. “That nurse seems very good,” he said at the end. “The doctor didn’t come until half an hour ago. He went away again right away. They haven’t given her any chloroform yet. They say they are keeping that until the pains get worse. I don’t see how they could be. You’ve no conception what it was like.” He stayed with me for half an hour and read my newspapers. Then he went home. “I’ll telephone you when there’s any news,” he said.

Two hours later I rang up. “No,” he said, “there’s no news. I said I’d telephone you if there was.”

“But what’s happening?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of lull.”

“But she’s all right, isn’t she? I mean they’re not anxious.”

“I don’t know. The doctor’s coming again. I went in to see her, but she didn’t say anything. She was just crying quietly.”

“Nothing I can do, is there?”

“No, how could there be?”

“I mean about lunch or anything. You don’t feel like coming out?”

“No, I ought to stay around here.”

The thought of the lull, of Lucy not speaking, but lying there, in tears, waiting for her labour to start again, pierced me as no tale could have done of cumulative pain; but beyond my sense of compassion I was now scared. I had been smoking a pipe; my mouth had gone dry, and when I knocked out the smouldering tobacco the smell of it sickened me. I went out into Ebury Street as though to the deck of a ship, breathing hard against nausea, and from habit more than sentiment, took a cab to the Zoo.

The man at the turnstile knew me as a familiar figure. “Your lady not with you today, sir?”

“No, not today.”

“I’ve got five myself,” he said.

I did not understand him and repeated foolishly, “Five?”

“Being a married man,” he added.

Humboldt’s Gibbon seemed disinclined for company. He sat hunched up at the back of his cage, fixing on me a steady, and rather bilious stare. He was never, at the best of times, an animal who courted popularity. In the cage on his left lived a sycophantish, shrivelled, grey monkey from India who salaamed for tidbits of food; on his right were a troup of patchy buffoons who swung and tumbled about their cage to attract attention. Not so Humboldt’s Gibbon; visitors passed him by—often with almost superstitious aversion and some such comment as “Nasty thing”; he had no tricks, or, if he had, he performed them alone, for his own satisfaction, after dark, ritualistically, when, in that exotic enclave among the stucco terraces, the prisoners awake and commemorate the jungles where they had their birth, as exiled darkies, when their work is done, will tread out the music of Africa in a vacant lot behind the drug store.

Lucy used always to bring fruit to the ape; I had nothing, but, to deceive him, I rattled the wire and held out my empty fingers as though they held a gift. He unrolled himself, revealing an extraordinary length of black limb, and came delicately towards me on toes and fingertips; his body was slightly pigeon chested and his fur dense and short, his head was spherical, without the poodle-snout of his neighbours—merely two eyes and a line of yellow teeth set in leather, like a bare patch worn in a rug. He was less like a man than any of his kind and he lacked their human vulgarity. When, at short range, he realized that I held nothing for him he leapt suddenly at the bars and hung there, spread out to his full span, spiderish, snarling with contempt; then dropped to the floor and turning about walked delicately back to the corner from which I had lured him. So I looked at him and thought of Lucy, and the minutes passed.

Presently I was aware of someone passing behind me from the salaaming monkey to the troup of tumblers, and back again, and at either side peering not at the animals but at me. I gazed fixedly at the ape, hoping that this nuisance would pass. Finally a voice said, “I say.”

I turned and found Arthur Atwater. He was dressed as I had seen him before, in his raincoat, though it was a fine, warm day, and his soft grey hat, worn at what should have been a raffish angle but which, in effect, looked merely lopsided. (He explained the raincoat in the course of our conversation, saying, “You know how it is in digs. If you leave anything behind when you go out for the day, someone’s sure to take a fancy to it.”) “It is Plant, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Thought so. I never forget a face. They call it the royal gift, don’t they?”

“Do they?”

“Yes, that and punctuality. I’m punctual too. It’s a curious thing because you see, actually, though I don’t make any fuss about it in the position I’m in, I’m descended from Henry VII.” There seemed no suitable answer to this piece of information so, since I was silent, he added suddenly, “I say, you do remember me, don’t you?”

“Vividly.”

He came closer and leant beside me on the rail which separated us from the cage. It was as though we stood on board ship and were looking out to sea, only instead of the passing waters we saw the solitary, still person of Humboldt’s Gibbon. “I don’t mind telling you,” said Atwater, “I’ve had a pretty thin time of it since we last met.”

“I saw you were acquitted at the trial. I thought you were very fortunate.”

“Fortunate! You should have heard the things the beak said. Things he had no right to say and wouldn’t have dared say to a rich man, and said in a very nasty way, too—things I shan’t forget in a hurry. Mr. Justice Longworth—Justice, that’s funny. Acquitted without a stain! — innocent! Does that give me back my job?”

“But I understood from the evidence at the trial that you were under notice to go anyway.”

“Yes. And why? Because sales were dropping. Why should I sell their beastly stockings for them anyway? Money—that’s all anyone cares about now. And I’m beginning to feel the same way. When do you suppose I had my last meal—my last square meal?”

“I’ve really no idea, I’m afraid.”

“Tuesday. I’m hungry, Plant—literally hungry.”

“You could have saved yourself the sixpence admission here, couldn’t you?”

“I’m a Fellow,” said Atwater with surprising readiness.

“Oh.”

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

“I have no reason not to.”

“I can prove it; look here—Fellow’s tickets, two of them.” He produced and pressed on my attention two tickets of admission signed in a thin, feminine hand. “My dear Atwater,” I said, “these don’t make you a Fellow; they’ve merely been given you by someone who is—not that it matters.”

“Not that it matters! Let me tell you this: D’you know who gave me these? — the mother of a chap I know; chap I know well. I dropped round to see him the other evening, at the address I found in the telephone book. It was his mother’s house as it happened. My pal was abroad. But, anyway, I got talking to the mother and told her about how I was placed and what pals her son and I had been. She seemed a decent old bird. At the end she said, ‘How very sad. Do let me give you something,’ and began fumbling in her bag. I thought at least a quid was coming, and what did she give me? These tickets for the Zoo. I ask you!”