Arnold Bennett

The Roll-Call Arnold Bennett

At the corner dominated by the Queen's Elm, which on the great route from Piccadilly Circus toPutney was a public-house and halt second only in importance to the Redcliffe Arms, night fellearlier than it ought to have done, owing to a vast rain-cloud over Chelsea. A few drops descended, but so warm and so gently that they were not like real rain, and sentimentalists could not believe thatthey would wet. People, arriving mysteriously out of darkness, gathered sparsely on the pavements, lingered a few moments, and were swallowed by omnibuses that bore them obscurely away. Atintervals an individual got out of an omnibus and adventured hurriedly forth and was lost in thegloom. The omnibuses, all white, trotted on an inward curve to the pavement, stopped while theconductor, with hand raised to the bell-string, murmured apathetically the names of streets and ofpublic-houses, and then they jerked off again on an outward curve to the impatient double ting ofthe bell. To the east was a high defile of hospitals, and to the west the Workhouse tower faintlyimprinted itself on the sombre sky. The drops of rain grew very large and heavy, and the travellers, instead of waiting on the kerb, withdrew to the shelter of the wall of the Queen's Elm. George was now among the group, precipitated like the rest, as it were, out of the solution of London. George was of the age whichdoes not admit rain or which believes that it is immune from the usual consequences of exposure torain. When advised, especially by women, to defend himself against the treacheries of the weather, he always protested confidently that he would 'be all right.' Thus with a stick and a straw hat hewould affront terrible dangers. It was a species of valour which the event often justified. Indeed hegenerally was all right. But to-night, afoot on the way from South Kensington Station in a regionquite unfamiliar to him, he was intimidated by the slapping menace of the big drops. Reality facedhim. His scared thought ran: "Unless I do something at once I shall get wet through." Impossible toappear drenched at old Haim's! So he had abandoned all his pretensions to a magical invulnerability, and rushed under the eave of the Queen's Elm to join the omnibus