The Devil

Then Dale lived again for the hundred thousandth time in the thoughts and passions of that distant period.

The forest glade grew dim, vanished. He was lying on the grass in a London park, and Mavis' confession rang through the buzzing of his ears, through the chaos of his mind. It seemed that the whole of his small imagined world had gone to pieces, and the immensity of the real world had been left to him in exchange--crushing him with an idea of its unexplored vastness, of its many countries, its myriad races. And yet, big as it all was, it could not provide breathing space for that man and himself.

Soon this became an oppressive certainty. Life under the new conditions had been rendered unendurable. And then there grew up the one solid determination, that he must stand face to face with his enemy and call him to account. It must at last be man to man. He must tell the man what he thought of him, call him filthy names, strip him of every shred of dignity--and strike him. A few blows of scorn might suffice--a backhander across the snout, a few swishes with a stick, a kick behind when he turned. He was too rottenly weak a thing to fight with.

His mind refused to go further than this. However deeply and darkly it was working below the surface of consciousness, it gave him no further directions than this.

He got rid of his wife. That was the first move in the game--anyhow. He did not want to think about her now; she would be dealt with again later on. At present he wished to concentrate all his attention on the other one.

He took a bed for himself in a humbler and cheaper house farther west, a little nearer to the house of his enemy; and almost all that day he spent in thinking how and where he should obtain the meeting he longed for. He understood at once that it would be hopeless to attempt such an interview at Grosvenor Place. In imagination he saw himself escorted by servants to that tank-like room at the back of the mansion--the room where the man had treated him as dirt, where his first instinct of distrust had been aroused, where all those photographs of girls had subtly suggested the questioning doubts that led him on to suspicion and discovery. The man would come again to this room, with his tired eyes and baggy cheeks and drooping lip; would stare contemptuously; and at the first words of abuse, he would ring a bell, call for servants, call for the police, and have the visitor ignominiously turned out. "Policeman, this ruffian has been threatening me. He is an ill-conditioned dog that I've been systematically kind to, and he now seems to have taken leave of his senses and accuses me of injuring him. For the sake of his wife, who is a good respectful sort of person, I do not give him in charge. But I ask you to keep an eye on him. And if he dares to return to my door, just cart him off to the police station." No, that would not do at all. He and Mr. Barradine must meet somewhere quietly and comfortably, out of reach of electric bells, butlers, and police officers.