The Angel of Pain by E. F. Benson

Author:E. F. Benson [Benson, E. F. (Edward Frederic)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-11-17T05:00:00+00:00

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THIRTEENTH

BY Monday morning when he returned to town, Philip had quite made up his mind that all thought of travel by way of distraction was futile, and had determined to find in work, the hardest and most continuous, a succession of hours of forgetfulness, so far as he could secure it, of this blow that had fallen on him. Forgetfulness itself, he knew well he could not hope to secure, but by hard application of the brain to work, he hoped that for this hour and for that he would be able to put that which had so stricken and embittered him on a second and more remote plane of consciousness. True, at any relaxation, at any interval in which his brain was not actively employed, it would start out again like the writing on the wall; but for the working hours of the day, and these he determined should be long and fully filled, he believed he could to some extent crush the other out of his consciousness. In work, at any rate, he believed his best chance lay, and the attempt, though perhaps desperate, was one which none but a strong man could have made.

He occupied at present while in London a flat in Jermyn Street, modest in dimensions, but containing all he wanted. There was a spare room there which his mother always used on her rather rare visits to town, but otherwise it held only the necessary accommodation for two servants and himself. He had already given his landlord notice that he was going to quit, but to-day he went to the estate office to ask if he could renew his tenancy since his bachelor days were not yet over. All this was horribly uncomfortable; he felt that the clerk in the office knew what had happened, and would, after his departure, talk it and him over with the other clerks, and though their criticism and comments could not possibly matter to him, he felt that some deformity, some malformation or scar of his own body was being publicly shown the world, and he hated the world for looking at it. Then also he had to say that he should not require the house for which he was in contract in Berkeley Square, to complete which nothing really remained except the signing of the lease. It was all a business so unexpectedly disagreeable that he wished he had conducted it by letter.

To-day promised to be very busy; he was to have dined that night with Lady Ellington, but that engagement was automatically cancelled, and he left word at his flat that he would be there that night, and would dine alone. That done, he drove straight down to the City, where he expected that there would be awaiting him a report of an agent of his with regard to certain South African mining properties on which he held an extremely large option which he must take up before the end of the week, when it expired.

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