Young Holsten's face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation
of ease that marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercised
body. He hesitated at the White Stone Pond whether to go to the left of
it or the right, and again at the fork of the roads. He kept shifting
his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would get in the way of
people on the footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty
of his movements. He felt, he confesses, 'inadequate to ordinary
existence.' He seemed to himself to be something inhuman and
mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly prosperous, fairly
happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead--a week of work
and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading--and he had launched
something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held their
contentments and ambitions and satisfactions together. 'Felt like an
imbecile who has presented a box full of loaded revolvers to a Creche,'
he notes.
He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now
knows only that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten
walked together and Holsten was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson
to tell him he overworked and needed a holiday. They sat down at a
little table outside the County Council house of Golders Hill Park and
sent one of the waiters to the Bull and Bush for a couple of bottles of
beer, no doubt at Lawson's suggestion.
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