Counterparts Page #2

								

drinking with his friends amid the glare of gas and the clatter of
glasses. He got out the Delacour correspondence and passed out of the
office. He hoped Mr Alleyne would not discover that the last two
letters were missing.

The moist pungent perfume lay all the way up to Mr Alleyne’s room. Miss
Delacour was a middle-aged woman of Jewish appearance. Mr Alleyne was
said to be sweet on her or on her money. She came to the office often
and stayed a long time when she came. She was sitting beside his desk
now in an aroma of perfumes, smoothing the handle of her umbrella and
nodding the great black feather in her hat. Mr Alleyne had swivelled
his chair round to face her and thrown his right foot jauntily upon his
left knee. The man put the correspondence on the desk and bowed
respectfully but neither Mr Alleyne nor Miss Delacour took any notice
of his bow. Mr Alleyne tapped a finger on the correspondence and then
flicked it towards him as if to say: “That’s all right: you can go.”

The man returned to the lower office and sat down again at his desk. He
stared intently at the incomplete phrase: In no case shall the said
Bernard Bodley be ... and thought how strange it was that the last
three words began with the same letter. The chief clerk began to hurry
Miss Parker, saying she would never have the letters typed in time for
post. The man listened to the clicking of the machine for a few minutes
and then set to work to finish his copy. But his head was not clear and
his mind wandered away to the glare and rattle of the public-house. It
was a night for hot punches. He struggled on with his copy, but when
the clock struck five he had still fourteen pages to write. Blast it!
He couldn’t finish it in time. He longed to execrate aloud, to bring
his fist down on something violently. He was so enraged that he wrote
Bernard Bernard instead of Bernard Bodley and had to begin again on
a clean sheet.

He felt strong enough to clear out the whole office singlehanded. His
body ached to do something, to rush out and revel in violence. All the
indignities of his life enraged him.... Could he ask the cashier
privately for an advance? No, the cashier was no good, no damn good: he
wouldn’t give an advance.... He knew where he would meet the boys:
Leonard and O’Halloran and Nosey Flynn. The barometer of his emotional
nature was set for a spell of riot.

His imagination had so abstracted him that his name was called twice
before he answered. Mr Alleyne and Miss Delacour were standing outside
the counter and all the clerks had turned round in anticipation of
something. The man got up from his desk. Mr Alleyne began a tirade of
abuse, saying that two letters were missing. The man answered that he
knew nothing about them, that he had made a faithful copy. The tirade
continued: it was so bitter and violent that the man could hardly
restrain his fist from descending upon the head of the manikin before
him:

“I know nothing about any other two letters,” he said stupidly.
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