Ruined City Read Online Free PDF Page A

butler hesitated again. 'I don't know that I can quite answer that, sir. But it hasn't been the sort of house that one would care to spend one's life in, if you understand what I mean.'
    Warren said, 'I understand.' Me nodded to the man. 'All right Evans — that'll do. I'll see you all in the morning.'
    The man left him, and he sat for a long time before the fire, quiet and motionless, full of reflection. So that was it. His house, his mode of life, had become so notorious that decent servants wouldn't stay with him; they had their own lives to consider. He did not blame them. But if that was what his servants thought about it all, what would London and the City think?
    Prince Ali Said . . . Already he could frame the limericks and the conundrums in his mind. He knew the Stock Exchange.
    He sat on in the library, quiet, without reading; as the fire died the shadows closed in upon him. He had worked hard all his life. He had been in the Gunners in the War and had risen to command a battery; he could still remember the sequence of his firing orders, the colours of the different grades of shell, and that you concentrated when the aiming point was in the rear. He had gone into his father's bank at the Armistice and had worked hard in the City for the last fifteen years.
    His life, he thought, was more than half over. He had worked hard since he was a boy; what had he got to show for it?
    His wife had left him, had preferred a coloured man. His house was one that decent people would not stay in, even if they were servants. He had few friends; he worked too hard for that. His health was still good, but he had grown nervous and irritable; that was the work again, tie difficulty that he had in sleeping due to lack of exercise, perhaps, due also to the drugs he took to make him sleep. In the morning he would take the necessary steps to close the house and put it up for sale. Then, he supppsed, he would go and live in a service flat, and try to build up a new life — for what? For more work? He had worked hard for fifteen years and had got nothing, it seemed to him, that was worth having.
    Presently he left the library and went up to his room. He stood for a time looking at his face in the mirror; he saw it to be lined and haggard, the face of a man older than his years. He turned away, and went mechanically to the drawer of his dressing-table; he would not sleep that night without the assistance of his allonal.
    He took the little vial in his hand. He saw an old face twitching at him from the mirror; the battery major straightened up, a gust of passion swept over him. 'My God,' he said aloud. Tm looking like a corpse.' Impulsively he threw the vial in the fire and turned towards his bed.
    He hardly slept at all mat night.
    He set about his business early next morning, the keen mind dulled and impeded with fatigue. He saw the servants after breakfast and gave them, in hard, businesslike fashion, the gist of what he had already told the butler; a month's notice with three month's pay. Then he sat down and wrote a letter to Elise, hard and efficient, to ask her to remove her things from the house within the month, before he put the furniture in store. He paid a visit to a house agent. And then he went to his solicitor, and sat in conference with him for an hour.
    He lunched at a solitary table in his club, reserved and aloof. In the smoking-room, over his coffee, he fell into an uneasy sleep and woke after twenty minutes of twitching insensibility, dazed and unwell.
    He went down to his office.
    In the house that he had left the servants gathered round to talk about their notice, dispersed to make pretence of work, and gathered round again. 'I won't say but what three months' pay will be a comfort and a nest egg to put by,' said the cook. 'But what a thing to happen in the house!'
    'I never did like black gentlemen,' said Elsie. That Prince Ali, he gave me the shudders the first time I saw him. What she could see in him . .