The Roll-Call | Page 9

had passed the
Intermediate, Mr. Lucas had not. But in manly beauty, in stylishness, in
mature tact, and especially in persuasive charm, he could beat George.
"Hallo!" Lucas greeted. "How do you feel? Fit?"
"Fit?" said George enthusiastically "I feel so fit I could push in the side
of a house."
"What did I tell you?" said Lucas.
George rubbed his hand all over Lucas's hair, and Lucas thereupon
seized George's other hand and twisted his arm, and a struggle followed.
In this way they would often lovingly salute each other of a morning.
Lucas had infected George with the craze for physical exercises as a
remedy for all ills and indiscretions, including even late nights and
excessive smoking. The competition between them to excel in the
quality of fitness was acute, and sometimes led to strange challenges.
After a little discussion about springing from the toes, Lucas now
accused George's toes of a lack of muscularity, and upon George
denying the charge, he asserted that George could not hang from the
mantelpiece by his toes. They were both men of the world, capable of
great heights of dignity, figures in an important business, aspirants to a
supreme art and profession. They were at that moment in a beautiful
late-eighteenth-century house of a stately and renowned square, and in
a room whose proportions and ornament admittedly might serve as an
exemplar to the student; and not the least lovely feature of the room
was the high carved mantelpiece. The morning itself was historic, for it
was the very morning upon which, President McKinley having expired,
Theodore Roosevelt ascended the throne and inaugurated a new era.
Nevertheless, such was their peculiar time of life that George, a minute
later, was as a fact hanging by his toes from the mantelpiece, while
Lucas urged him to keep the blood out of his head. George had stood
on his hands on a box and lodged his toes on the mantelpiece, and then
raised his hands--and Lucas had softly pushed the box away. George's
watch was dangling against his flushed cheek.

"Put that box back, you cuckoo!" George exploded chokingly.
Then the door opened and Mr. Enwright appeared. Simultaneously
some shillings slipped out of George's pocket and rolled about the floor.
The hour was Mr. Enwright's customary hour of arrival, but he had no
fair excuse for passing through that room instead of proceeding along
the corridor direct to the principals' room. His aspect, as he gazed at
George's hair and at the revealed sateen back of George's waistcoat,
was unusual. Mr. Enwright commonly entered the office full of an
intense and aggrieved consciousness of his own existence--of his
insomnia, of the reaction upon himself of some client's stupidity, of the
necessity of going out again in order to have his chin lacerated by his
favourite and hated Albanian barber. But now he had actually forgotten
himself.
"What is this?" he demanded.
Lucas having quickly restored the box, George subsided dangerously
thereon, and arose in a condition much disarrayed and confused, and
beheld Mr. Enwright with shame.
"I--I was just looking to see if the trap of the chimney was shut," said
George. It was foolish in the extreme, but it was the best he could do,
and after all it was a rather marvellous invention. Lucas sat down and
made no remark.
"You might respect the mantelpiece," said Mr. Enwright bitterly, and
went into the principals' room, where John Orgreave could be heard
dictating letters. George straightened his clothes and picked up his
money, and the two men of the world giggled nervously at each other.
Mr. Haim next disturbed them. The shabby, respectable old man smiled
vaguely, with averted glance.
"I think he's heard the result," said he.
Both men knew that 'he' was Mr. Enwright, and that the 'result' was the
result of the open competition for the £150,000 Law Courts which a

proud provincial city proposed to erect for itself. The whole office had
worked very hard on the drawings for that competition throughout the
summer, while cursing the corporation which had chosen so unusual a
date for sending-in day. Even Lucas had worked. George's ideas for
certain details, upon which he had been engaged on the evening of his
introduction to Mr. Haim's household, had been accepted by Mr.
Enwright. As for Mr. Enwright, though the exigencies of his beard, and
his regular morning habit of inveighing against the profession at great
length, and his inability to decide where he should lunch, generally
prevented him from beginning the day until three o'clock in the
afternoon, Mr. Enwright had given many highly concentrated hours of
creative energy to the design. And Mr. Haim had adorned the sheets
with the finest lettering. The design was held to be very good. The
principals knew