S a midge before an elephant, so is man when opposed to Fate. The elephant breathes or lies down, and the high shrill of the midge is done. The midge believes passionately that the looming monster which shuts out his whole world has come across the earth with this one awful purpose of destroying his little life. But the elephant knows less of the midge than the midge knows of the elephant. …
George Coleman was not a figure that one would associate with the blunderings of outrageous destiny. He was of the type that seems born to move easily and contentedly through life; neither success nor failure; a tall, thin, fair man, reasonably intelligent, placidly thirty-five, and neither too diligent nor noticeably lazy. He was one of the many who had failed to find briefs; and one of the few who had, nevertheless, succeeded in earning a decent income. He had obtained, through special influence, a post as legal secretary and adviser to a great firm of financiers in the City. The post was almost a sinecure and the salary £800 a year. Added to that, he had another £300 of his own. He spent his holidays in Switzerland or Italy or Norway.
Any suburb would have made him a church-warden, but he preferred to go on living in his chambers, in Old Buildings, Lincoln's Inn. He was used to the inconveniences, and the place satisfied his feeble feeling for romance.
His friend Morley Price, the architect, told him that there was a sinister influence about those chambers. They were on the fifth floor, and boasted a dormer window that might have been done by Sime, in a mood of final recklessness. The dormer was in the sitting-room, and looked out on to the court. Price loved to lie back in his chair and stare at it, attempting vainly to account by archaeology and building construction for the twists and contortions of the jambs and soffit.
"It's a filthy freak, Coleman," was his usual conclusion; "not the work of a decent human mind, but a horrid, sinister growth that comes from within. One day it will put out another tentacle and crush you." After that he would fit his pipe into the gap in his front teeth and return to another attempt at formulating a theory of causation. He had always refused to consider any artificial substitute for those lost teeth. He said that the hole was the natural place for his pipe. Also, that the disfigurement was distinguished and brought him business.
If it had been Morley Price, now. … However, it was the absurdly commonplace George Coleman.
The beginning of it all was ordinary enough. He fell in love with a young woman who lived in Surbiton. She was pretty, dark, svelt, and looked perfectly fascinating with a pole at the stern of a punt, while her fox-terrier, Mickie, barked at swallows from the bow.
Coleman was quite acceptable. He punted even better than she did, and he was devoted to dogs, and more especially to Mickie. Nothing could have been more satisfactory and altogether delightful before the elephant came£a vast, ubiquitous, imperturbable beast that the doctors called typhoid.
After Muriel died, Coleman took Mickie home to his chambers in Old Buildings, Lincoln's Inn. Mickie was more than a legacy; he was a sacred trust. Coleman had sworn to cherish him when his lovely mistress had been called away to join the headquarters of that angelic host to which she had hitherto belonged as a planetary member. She had appeared to be more concerned about Mickie than about George, at the last. She had not known George so long.
But it was George who cherished her memory. Mickie settled down at once. Within a week Muriel might never have existed, so far as he was concerned. If there was no longer a punt for him, there was a dormer window with a broad, flat seat that served equally well; and in place of migrant swallows there were perennial sparrows.
Coleman was not more sentimental than the average Englishman. At first he was "terribly cut up," as he might have phrased it; but six weeks after Muriel's death the cuts, in normal conditions, would doubtless have cicatrized.
Unhappily, the conditions were anything but normal. The vast bulk of the elephant was between him and any possible road of escape. In this second instance Fate assumed the form of certain mannerisms in Mickie.