MEANWHILE Dwala, all unconscious, was standing on Parliament Hill, with Miss Briscoe’s tall figure at his side. It must have been some unwitting prescience which took them there that day.
London lay at their feet: London, which Dwala had never seen; London, where his life would lie from this day forth. Not the formless, endless, straight-ruled London seen by the man in the street; not a pervading, uniform, roaring, inevitable presence: but London apart; in the distance; without sound; without smell; set to a foreground of sun-beaten grass and a gambolling wind from the fields and seas; a thing with a shape; a whole; bounded, surrounded, grim and grimy, sprawling down the dishonoured valley; murky, random, ridged and toothed, like the débris of Ladoga’s ice, piled in the Neva by December.
Dwala laughed.
It was a joke of a magnitude fitted to his monstrous mind. ‘Man is the laughing animal:’ he had proved himself human. Behold, he had worshipped Man and his inventions; he had come forth to see the sublimest invention of all; he had travelled over half the world for it; everywhere they spoke of it with awe. And now he had seen it. It was London.
The hill shook with his laughter. All the birds and beasts in the big city heard it and made answer—cheeping, squeaking, mewing, barking, whinnying, and braying together; forgetful, for the moment, of their long debates on the habits of mankind, their tedious tales of human sagacity, their fruitless altercations as to whether men had instinct or were guided only by reason.
The commotion escaped Miss Briscoe’s notice: she heard only one deep guttural laugh beside her, and looking up, beheld a grave impassive face.
‘There is St. Paul’s: do you see, Prince? How grand it looks, watching over the great city like a shepherd over his flock. “Toil on, toil on, my children,” it seems to say: “I am here in the midst of you, the Church, the Temple builded of the lowly Carpenter, with my message of strength for the faint-hearted, consolation for the afflicted, peace for all when the day’s task is done. Toil on, that the great work may be accomplished at last.”’
‘Work? Ah, you may well say work,’ said a voice from the bench beside them.
An old man was sitting there; a handsome old man, with a strong, bony face. His knobbed hands rested on the top of a walking-stick, his chin on his hands. He wore the unmistakable maroon jacket and black shovel-hat of the workhouse; corduroys clothed his lean and hollow thighs.
‘Bless you, there’s work for everyone as wants to work. See that chimney down there, that biggun? That’s Boffin’s, where I was. Three and fifty years I worked at Boffin’s.’
‘Was it a happy life?’ asked Miss Briscoe.
‘Happy? Bless you, the times I’ve had there when I was a youngster. Always up to larks. There’s three of my grandsons there now.’
Miss Briscoe admired his furrowed, placid face. ‘Take this,’ she whispered.
The old man looked coldly at a shilling.
‘No, thanky ... but if the gentleman has some tabacca on him, I could do with a bit.’
As they neared the bottom of the hill, Mr. Cato came hurrying towards them. There were tears in his eyes, and wet hollows in his cheeks.
‘Well, Dwala my boy, I’ve brought you news. You’re going into London to-night, to your new home.’
Dwala put up his face to the sky and laughed again.