He felt himself that his leaders were growing rather stale, lacking in spontaneity. His style did not glitter and ring quite as usual. And Basil had helped him through this time wonderfully.
One Wednesday--he remembered the day afterwards--Spence awoke about mid-day. He had been late at the office the night before and afterwards had gone to a club, not going to bed till after four.
He heard the laundress moving about the chambers preparing his breakfast. He shouted to her, and in a minute or two she came in with his letters and a cup of tea. She went to the window and pulled up the blind, letting a dreary grey-yellow December light into the room.
"Nasty day, Mrs. Buscall," he said, sipping his tea.
"It is so, sir," the woman said, a lean, kindly-faced London drudge from a court in Drury Lane. "Gives me a frog in my throat all the time, this fog does. You'd better let me pour a drop of hot water in your bath, sir. I've got the kettle on the gas stove."
The laundress had an objection to baths, deep-rooted and a matter of principle. The daily cold tub she regarded as suicidal, and when Gortre had arrived, her pained surprise at finding him also--a clergyman too!--addicted to such adventurous and injudicious habits had been as extreme as her disappointment.
Spence agreed to humour her, and she began to prepare the bath.
"Letter from Mr. Cyril, I see, sir," she remarked. Mrs. Buscall loved the archæologist with more strenuousness than her other two charges. The unusual and mysterious has a real fascination for a certain type of uneducated Cockney brain. Hands's rare sojourns at the chambers, the Eastern dresses and pictures in his room, his strange and perilous life--as she considered it--in the veritable Bible land, where Satan actually roamed the desert in the form of a lion seeking whom he might devour, all these stimulated her crude imagination and brought colour into the dreary purlieus of Drury Lane.
Most of the women around Mrs. Buscall drank gin. The doings of Cyril Hands were sufficient tonic for her.
Spence glanced at the bulky packet with its Turkish stamps and peculiar aroma--which the London fog had not yet killed--of ships and alien suns. Hands was a good correspondent. Sometimes he sent general articles on the work he was doing, not too technical, and Ommaney, the editor of Spence's paper, used and paid well for them.