CHAPTER V

READING FOR THE BAR


It had been a hot, windless day in London, in early September.
Though summer was in full swing in the country without a hint of
autumn, the foliage in the squares and gardens of the Inns of Court
was already seared and a little shrivelled. The privet hedges were
almost black green; and the mould in the dismal borders that they
screened looked as though it had never known rain or hose water and
as if it could no more grow bright-tinted flowers than the asbestos
of a gas stove which it resembled in consistency and colour. It was
now an evening, ending one of those days which are peculiarly
disheartening to a Londoner returned from a long stay in the depths
of the country--a country which has hills and streams, ferny
hollows, groups of birches, knolls surmounted with pines, meadows of
lush, emerald-green grass, full-foliaged elms, twisted oaks,
orchards hung with reddening apples, red winding lanes between
unchecked hedges, blue mountains in the far distance, and the
glimpse of a river or of ponds large enough to be called a mere or
even a lake. The exhausted London to which David Williams had
returned a few days previously had lost a few thousands of its
West-end and City population--just, in fact, most of its interesting
if unlikable folk, its people who mattered, its insolent spoilt
darlings whom you liked to recognize in the Carlton atrium, in Hyde
Park, in a box at the theatre: yet the frowsy, worthy millions were
there all the same. The air of its then smelly streets was used up
and had the ammoniac strench of the stable. It was a weary London.