“I’m a countryman by birth,” he said: “it’s like the country here. If I could get a job down in the country I should pick up, perhaps. Last time I was in the country I put on ’alf a stone. But who’d take me?” Again he raised his little pipes of arms; this time it was clearly not to show his strength. No--he seemed to say: “No one would take me! I have found that out--I have found out all there is to know. I am done for!” “That’s about where it is,” he said; “and I wouldn’t care so much, but for the baby and my wife. I don’t see what I could ha’ done, other than what I have done. God knows I kept on at it till I couldn’t keep on no longer.” And as though he knew that he was again near that point when a hundred times he had broken into private agony, seen by no creature but himself, he stared hard at me, and his red moustache bristled over his sunken, indrawn lips. A pigeon flew across; settling on a tree in the next garden it began to call its mate; and suddenly there came into my mind the memory of a thrush that, some months before, had come to the garden bed where we were standing, and all day long would hide and hop there, avoiding other birds, with its feathers all staring and puffed out. I remembered how it would let us take it up, and the film that kept falling on its eyes, and its sick heart beating so faintly beneath our hands; no bird of all the other birds came near it--knowing that it could no longer peck its living, and was going to die. One day we could not find it; the next day we found it under a bush, dead. “I suppose it’s human nature not to take me on, seein’ the state I’m in,” the little baker said. “I don’t want to be a trouble to no one, I’m sure; I’ve always kept myself, ever since I was that high,” he put his hand out level with his waist; “and now I can’t keep myself, let alone the wife and child. It’s the coming to the end of everything--it’s the seeing of it coming. Fear--that’s what it is! But I suppose I’m not the only one.” And for that moment he seemed comforted by this thought that there were thousands of other working creatures, on whose shoulders sat the grinning cat of mortal illness, all staring with him at utter emptiness--thousands of other working creatures who were dying because fear had made them work too long. His face brightened ever so little, as though the sun had found a way to him. But suddenly that wooden look, the only safe and perfect look, came back to his features. One could have sworn that fear had never touched him, so expressionless, so still was he! FASHION VI FASHION