Out in Harley Street, Simon walked hurriedly and without a goal. It was getting past luncheon time, but he had forgotten the fact.
Oppenshaw was one of those men who carry conviction. You will have noticed in life that quite a lot of people don't convince. They may be good, they may be earnest, but they don't convince. Selling a full-grown dog in the world's market, they have little chance against a convincing competitor selling a pup.
Oppenshaw's twenty-five thousand a year came, in good part, from this quality. He had convinced Simon of the fact that inside Simon lay youth that was once Simon; youth that, though unseen and unknown to the world, could still dominate its container, even to the extent of meddling with his bank balance.
The latter, for Simon, was at this moment the main fact in the situation. It was sufficiently bad that this old, imperious youth should be able to make him act foolishly, but that was nothing to the fact that it was able to tamper with his money.
Simon's money was the solid ground under his feet, and he recognized, now, that it was everything to him—everything. He could have sacrificed at a pinch all else; he could have sacrificed Mudd, his furniture, his old prints, his cellar, but his money was even more than the ground under his feet; it was himself.
Suppose this disease were to recur often and at shorter intervals, or become chronic? He calculated furiously that at the rate of five thousand a month his fortune would last, roughly, a year and a half. He saw his securities being sold, his property in Hertfordshire, his furniture, his pictures.
He had a remedy, it is true—to put himself under restraint. A nice sort of remedy!
In Weymouth Street, the home of nursing homes and doctors, into which he had wandered, his mind tension became so acute that the impulse came on him to hurry back to Oppenshaw in the vague hope that something else might be done—some operation, for instance. He knew little of medicine and less of surgery, but he had heard of people being operated on for brain mischief, and he remembered, now, having read of an old admiral who had lost consciousness, owing to an injury at the battle of the Nile, and had remained unconscious till an “operation” cured him some months later.
He was saved from bothering Oppenshaw again by an instinctive feeling that it would be useless. You cannot extract the follies of youth by an operation. He went on trending toward Oxford Street, but still without object.
What made his position worse was his instinct as a solicitor. For forty years he had, among other work, been engaged in tying up youth so that it could not get at property, extracting youth from pitfalls it had tumbled into while carrying property in its arms. The very words “youth” and “property,” innocent in themselves, were obnoxious to Simon when combined. He had always held that no young man ought to inherit till he was twenty-five, and, Heaven knows, that opinion had a firm basis in experience. He had always, in law, looked askance on youth and its doings. In practice, he had been tolerant enough, though indeed, youth comes little in the way of a hard-working and prominent elderly solicitor, but in law, and he was mostly law, he had little tolerance, no respect.
And here was youth with his property in its arms, or what was, perhaps, even worse—the imminent dread of that unholy alliance.
In Oxford Street he stopped at a shop window and inspected ladies' blouses. That was his condition of mind. Jewelers' windows held him, not by the excellence of their goods, but by the necessity to turn his back to the crowd and think—think—think.
His mind was in a turmoil and he could no more control his thoughts than he could have controlled the traffic. The wares of the merchants exposed to view seemed to do the thinking. Gold Alberts only held his eye to explain that his lands in Hertfordshire, flung on the market in the present state of agriculture, would not fetch a tithe of their worth, but that his green-seal sherry and all the treasures of his cellar would bring half the West End to their sale.
Other things in other shops spoke to him in a like manner, and then he found himself at Oxford Circus with the sudden consciousness that this was not fighting Lethmann's disease by the exercise of will. His will had, in fact, been in abeyance, his imagination master of him.
But a refuge in the middle of Oxford Circus was not exactly the place for the reëquipmeent of will power. As he crossed, the effort nearly cost him his life, for he barely escaped a motor lorry. Then, when he had reached the other side and could resume work, free of danger, he found that he had apparently no will to reëquip.