I gave a sigh of relief. The ambitious young man with one ear open for stellar voices, and the overburdened John Bunyan, and any number of other short-winded pedestrians, could no longer monopolize the upward and onward literature of our own or former times. I too had arrived.
Another jerk to the right--a trot up an incline, and we stopped at a steep flight of steps--a regular Jacob's-ladder flight--leading to a corridor dimly lighted by the flare of a single gas jet. Up this I stumbled, lugging the bags once more, my whole mind bent on reaching the platform at the earliest possible moment--a curious mental attitude, I am aware, for a man who had eaten nothing since noon, was still wet and shivering inside, and half frozen outside--nose, cheeks, and fingers---from a wind that cut like a circular saw.
As I landed the last bag on the top step--the fog-horn couldn't leave his horse--I became conscious of the movements of a short, rotund, shad-shaped gentleman in immaculate white waistcoat, stiff choker and wide expanse of shirt front. He was approaching me from the door of the lecture hall in which sat the audience; then a clammy hand was thrust out--and a thin voice trickled this sentence:
“You're considerable late sir--our people have been in their--”
“I am _what!_” I cried, straightening up.
“I said you were forty minutes late, sir. We expect our lecturers to be on--”
That was the fulminate that exploded the bomb. Up to now I had held myself in hand. I was carrying, I knew, 194 pounds of steam, and I also knew that one shovel more of coal would send the entire boiler into space, but through it all I had kept my hand on the safety-valve. It might have been the white waistcoat or the way the curved white collar cupped his billiard-ball of a chin, or it might have been the slight frown about his eyebrows, or the patronizing smile that drifted over his freshly laundered face; or it might have been the deprecating gesture with which he consulted his watch: whatever it was, out went the boiler.
“Late! Are you the man that's running this lecture course?”
“Well, sir, I have the management of it.”
“You have, have you? Then permit me to tell you right here, my friend, that you ought to sublet the contract to a five-year-old boy. You let me get out in the cold--send no conveyance as you agreed--”