The Escape
I
ALBERT HIGGS was beleaguered by all the circumstances of his life. He even found a word for his condition. "I'm beset," he thought, as he travelled home in a third-class compartment of the North London Railway; six a side.
The discovery brought him a momentary relief. Since four o'clock in the afternoon, more than two hours before he had left the office, he had been increasingly harassed by the necessity to find some word for his condition. The trouble and strain of it came between him and his work. As he almost automatically copied figures into the ledger, some part of his mind had been wearily, perpetually engaged in a hopeless struggle to find this word. He had visualised it quite distinctly as an enormously active beetle that traversed complicated figures with a horrid vivacity. If only he could have held it still, for one moment. … And, now, he had it. It was no longer a beetle—although the resemblance was quite obvious but a plain line of black sans-serif capitals—BESET.
He knew that he was in for another attack of influenza. That knowledge was the latest ally to join the beleaguering forces. Some men in Albert Higgs's position might have raised the siege, have laid down their arms and weakly submitted to the inevitable. Higgs was not that sort of man. He meant to flap impotent hands in the face of Fate until he was too weak to lift his arms; after that he would put his tongue out.
For ten years he had been braced to the struggle, and resistance had become a habit with him.
Nothing had ever gone right. He was the most conscientious worker in the office, but other clerks had been promoted over his head. The manager was always finding fault with him for being so slow. Perhaps he was slow. He liked to be absolutely certain about every detail connected with his work.
Then he was the only tenant in Golden Oak Road who appeared to have trouble with his landlord. He liked a house to be sound; and he was at considerable pains to see that defects did not go too far before they were remedied. He often wished that he had never taken No. 69. It was without doubt the worst house in the road; and an altogether disproportionate amount of his spare time was occupied in looking after it.
Worst of all, his marriage could hardly be counted a success. Emily was a good wife in many ways, but she was so abominably careless about vital details. She could not realise the importance of method and accuracy either in housework or cooking. He was always being forced to remonstrate with her, but she never improved.
And all these worries seemed to be steadily accumulating. He never had a moment, now, that was not filled by the necessity to counter some new difficulty. He was in no way daunted; he had no intention of relaxing his immense fight with adverse circumstance for a single instant; but he felt that it was very hard that he of all men should have been thus singled out for perpetual persecution. …
"I've got a temperature," he announced, as his wife came out of the kitchen to meet him.
"Then you'd better get off to bed at once," she said, with her usual disregard of the practicalities.
"How can I get off to bed?" he asked patiently. "You know there's that pipe in the kitchen to be seen to, and the loose board in the spare bedroom; and I'm going round to catch the landlord if I can. Being a Jew, he's sure to be in on a Friday night."
"Oh! them things can wait," Emily said.
"You'd let the house fall down if you had your way," he replied, without temper.
"No fear of that yet awhile," she said, with a laugh. "Now, you get off to your bed, and I'll make you some nice hot gruel."
"I've got them things to see to first," replied Albert Higgs.
But even as he was struggling to investigate an imaginary leakage in the waste-pipe of the kitchen sink, his influenza that had seemed so much better as he was on his way home, began to attack him again. He had forgotten his splendid key-word, and there was the beetle come back, gyrating in the flicker of the candle-end he was holding.
His wife found him squatting on the floor. She took the candle-end from him and helped him to his feet. She was cheerful but very determined.
"Now, my lord, you come along with me," she said, "or I'll be having you on me hands next."
He did not resist her, then. He was intent on renaming the beetle, and everything else had temporarily lost importance. But when he had eaten the hot gruel his wife brought him, he remembered the word.
"I'm beset, Emily," he said.
"You won't be in the morning," she replied foolishly. " You have a good sleep and you'll be as right as rain by to-morrow."
He shook his head. "I've always been beset," he said.
"It'll wear off," she said; and left him before he could find a suitable reply.
For a time he tried against his will to turn "beset" into "bested," but some letter evaded him, and then "bedstead" presented itself as a still more worrying alternative.
"It's no good lying here," said Albert Higgs aloud to the spaces of the room. "I'd better get up and see to that sink; it's got to be done sometime."
II
He got up at once, but his feet would not touch the floor. At first this intriguing phenomenon was decidedly exasperating, but little by little a great calm settled upon him.
He found that he was suspended over the bed regarding the image of a man who lay on his back and stared fixedly at the ceiling. He was not an attractive person, this interloper who had settled himself into Albert Higgs's bed. He had a look of bigoted obstinacy, as if he had set himself some perfectly futile task and meant to go through with it no matter who suffered in the performance. He was a small, rather weedy man, Higgs noticed, with high cheek-bones and a narrow forehead; he was getting bald, too, and had a little scrubby moustache. Higgs found him almost repulsive, and moved up a few yards to get away from him.
From his new position he could see the whole of number 69 Golden Oak Road; not only the front of the house, but the four walls, the roof, and the interior of every room; one comprehensible fragment of building. The sight of it, thus separated and complete, interested him for a time. He saw that it was ugly and badly built, that it could not hold together for many years; but even as he fiercely criticised it, the house became fused with all the other houses in the road, and he saw the long line of them as an indivisible whole. They were all alike, all equally ugly and with the same defects; and little figures moved about them, some satisfied and careless, others anxiously attempting useless repairs.
Then his sight of the road became merged into a vision of the district of Gospel Oak, which lay below him in strong relief as if he saw it from a high roof. He could look down into the channels of the streets, pricked out from the general gloom by the regular points of their little rows of lamps. And thousands of tiny figures swarmed in the streets and in the houses, all apparently precisely alike, moving hither and thither, tracing some indefinable pattern on a background, which continually increased in area so that the black spaces of Hampstead Heath were becoming included in his vision and the glare of Camden Town High Street. …
Presently he was able to locate Oxford Street and Piccadilly Circus, the outlined, threaded darkness of the parks, and the wide curves of the river; but the great spread of London was rapidly falling into a mere discoloration on a shallow saucer tipped by the hills of Buckinghamshire and Surrey. …
And the saucer was losing its concavity as it steadily grew in extent, slowly flattening, even reversing itself so that it was faintly convex. Round the edges of it a paler darkness crept, indenting the blackness of the land, outlining a section of the irregular but curiously familiar shape of the map of England. The wedge-shaped strip of the English Channel swam up until a silhouette of the French coast pushed into the horizon; the German Ocean encroached and spread to the right; Scotland and Ireland curved down in the vague distance, dwindling before the invasion of the Atlantic. The vast panorama filled the field of vision like a dark sky that was turning itself slowly inside out, becoming continually more convex as it receded. And in the East a white full moon rose over Europe and the edge of the sun showed a brilliant scimitar on the verge of the Atlantic. …
The immense convexity of the earth was flattening again, and the vast bulk of it no longer filled the universe. The sun and moon seemed to be drawing apart, and the moon was no longer full; an irregular clipping had gone from its upper edge as if a piece of it had been jagged away by titanic pliers. The earth, itself, was in its last quarter, a gigantic crescent stretching across two-thirds of the arc of the heavens; the faintly moonlit mass of it showing as a gloomy circle against the blackness of space, pierced now by innumerable points of light, the steady brilliance of infinitesimal stars.
But as it fell into the depths of space, the earth waned. The sun that had so miraculously risen was eclipsed behind its western edge; and the moon grown to the apparent size of its primary was rushing up to obscure in turn the whole width of the heavens. For a time it loomed as an enormous sphere, shutting out all sight of earth and stars, and then it, too, dwindled, became a void circle among the constellations of the Milky Way, and so vanished into the abyss. …
The sun shone one brighter point among the myriads that enclosed the spirit of Albert Higgs.
III
"Well, you have had a sleep," said the voice of Mrs. Higgs. "I tried to wake you an hour ago, but you was so heavy, I thought I'd better let you lie. Do you know what the time is? It's past eight. And you'll be late at the office unless you'd like me to send a telegram to say you're ill."
Higgs stared at her. He felt curiously peaceful and still.
The morning sunlight lay across the foot of his bed.
"I'm only just awake," he remarked.
"Well, I can see that for myself," said his wife. "Only as you're so particular about little things, perhaps you'll just tell me whether you mean to go to the office to-day or not."
"It isn't of the least consequence," replied Albert Higgs.
1913