ABSTRACT
EVEN had any one chanced to be loitering around Googe Street, W., one bright June afternoon in the year of grace 1916, it was extremely unlikely that he would have paused to cast a second glance at a certain stout figure which emerged from one of the innumerable foreign cafés that waft more or less grasy odours on that neighbourhood. In a quarter where fly-blown notices in divers languages are pasted to the windows, foreign newspapers hang from doors, and the presence of outlandish foods and dishes is proclaimed by various blackboards supported near the entrance—in fact just where London has become denationalized, and yielded, in a kind of dingy submission, to be overrun by aliens—not a detail, not a feature seemed to arrest attention, or serve to distinguish the man among a thousand others cast in the same mould, who have left the Fatherland in early manhood, and, as clerks or petty shopkeepers, swell the nondescript myriads of London’s nameless workers. Dress, hat, tie, were hopelessly, irretrievably bourgeois: and no doubt it was this lack of all push and individuality which had apparently washed him from the main stream of life into a stagnant back-water, i.e., a small “Agency and Employment Bureau,” offTottenham Court Road. Here the dull, blistered shutters were only too eloquent a witness of the owner’s prosperity, though a long-faded sign-board informed a none too curious public that Henry Smith—for of course business as well as the rights of British citizenship demanded the Anglicised name—was at their service in matters all and sundry.
