Widdershins | Page 3

designed as jewellery;
and Oleron walked about rubbing his hands, frequently stopping for the
mere pleasure of the glimpses from white room to white room....
"Charming, charming!" he said to himself. "I wonder what Elsie
Bengough will think of this!"
He bought a bolt and a Yale lock for his door, and shut off his quarters
from the rest of the house. If he now wanted to read in bed, his book
could be had for stepping into the next room. All the time, he thought
how exceedingly lucky he was to get the place. He put up a hat-rack in
the little square hall, and hung up his hats and caps and coats; and
passers through the small triangular square late at night, looking up
over the little serried row of wooden "To Let" hatchets, could see the

light within Oleron's red blinds, or else the sudden darkening of one
blind and the illumination of another, as Oleron, candlestick in hand,
passed from room to room, making final settlings of his furniture, or
preparing to resume the work that his removal had interrupted.
II
As far as the chief business of his life--his writing--was concerned,
Paul Oleron treated the world a good deal better than he was treated by
it; but he seldom took the trouble to strike a balance, or to compute
how far, at forty-four years of age, he was behind his points on the
handicap. To have done so wouldn't have altered matters, and it might
have depressed Oleron. He had chosen his path, and was committed to
it beyond possibility of withdrawal. Perhaps he had chosen it in the
days when he had been easily swayed by something a little
disinterested, a little generous, a little noble; and had he ever thought of
questioning himself he would still have held to it that a life without
nobility and generosity and disinterestedness was no life for him. Only
quite recently, and rarely, had he even vaguely suspected that there was
more in it than this; but it was no good anticipating the day when, he
supposed, he would reach that maximum point of his powers beyond
which he must inevitably decline, and be left face to face with the
question whether it would not have profited him better to have ruled his
life by less exigent ideals.
In the meantime, his removal into the old house with the insurance
marks built into its brick merely interrupted Romilly Bishop at the
fifteenth chapter.
As this tall man with the lean, ascetic face moved about his new abode,
arranging, changing, altering, hardly yet into his working-stride again,
he gave the impression of almost spinster-like precision and nicety. For
twenty years past, in a score of lodgings, garrets, flats, and rooms
furnished and unfurnished, he had been accustomed to do many things
for himself, and he had discovered that it saves time and temper to be
methodical. He had arranged with the wife of the long-nosed Barrett, a
stout Welsh woman with a falsetto voice, the Merionethshire accent of
which long residence in London had not perceptibly modified, to come

across the square each morning to prepare his breakfast, and also to
"turn the place out" on Saturday mornings; and for the rest, he even
welcomed a little housework as a relaxation from the strain of writing.
His kitchen, together with the adjoining strip of an apartment into
which a modern bath had been fitted, overlooked the alley at the side of
the house; and at one end of it was a large closet with a door, and a
square sliding hatch in the upper part of the door. This had been a
powder-closet, and through the hatch the elaborately dressed head had
been thrust to receive the click and puff of the powder-pistol. Oleron
puzzled a little over this closet; then, as its use occurred to him, he
smiled faintly, a little moved, he knew not by what.... He would have to
put it to a very different purpose from its original one; it would
probably have to serve as his larder.... It was in this closet that he made
a discovery. The back of it was shelved, and, rummaging on an upper
shelf that ran deeply into the wall, Oleron found a couple of
mushroom-shaped old wooden wig-stands. He did not know how they
had come to be there. Doubtless the painters had turned them up
somewhere or other, and had put them there. But his five rooms, as a
whole, were short of cupboard and closet-room; and it was only by the
exercise of some ingenuity that he was able to find places for the
bestowal of his household linen, his boxes, and his seldom-used but
not-to-be-destroyed accumulations of papers.
It was in early spring that Oleron entered