The parquetry all around the square of carpet was so smooth that Dale had slipped a foot and nearly come down when he entered the room and bowed to his judges; and now he moved with extreme caution when they told him to withdraw to the window.
There were three seated at the table, and none of the three was the Postmaster-General. Two of them were obviously bigwigs--so big, at any rate, that his fate lay in their hands; and the other one was a secretary--not the General Secretary--not even a gentleman, if one could draw any inference from his deferential tone and the casual manner in which the others addressed him. He was a sandy person--not unlike Ridgett, but rather older and much fatter.
Once a quiet young gentleman--a real gentleman, although apparently acting just as a clerk--had been in and out of the room. He had given Dale a half smile, and it had been welcome as a ray of sunlight on the darkest day of winter. Instinct told Dale that this nice young man sympathized with him, as certainly as it told him that his judges were unsympathetic.
He stood now in the deep bay window, as far as possible from the table, pretending not to listen while straining every nerve to catch the words that were being spoken over there. His blood was hurrying thickly, his heart beat laboriously, his collar stuck clammily to his perspiring neck. His sense of bodily fatigue was as great as if he had run a mile race; and yet one might say that the interview had scarcely begun. What would he be like before it was over? He summoned all his courage in order to go through with it gamely.
... "You can't have this sort of thing." The words had reached him distinctly--spoken by the one they called Sir John; and the one that Sir John called "Colonel" said with equal distinctness, "Certainly not."
Dale's heart beat more easily. As he hoped and believed, they must be talking of the soldier. Then the heart-beats came heavy again. Were they talking of him and not of the soldier? He caught a few other broken phrases of enigmatic import--such as "storm in teacup," "trouble caused," "no complaints"--and then the voices were lowered, and he heard no more of the conversation at the table.
Presently he saw that the secretary was producing a fresh file of papers, and at the same moment, quite inexplicably, his attention wandered. He had brought out a handkerchief, and while with a slow mechanical movement he rubbed the palms of his hands, he noticed and thought about the furniture and decoration of the room. Clock, map, and calendar; some busts on top of a bookless bookcase; red turkey carpet, the treacherous parquetry, and these stiff-looking chairs--really that was all. The emptiness and tidiness surprised him, and he began to wonder what the Postmaster-General's room was like. Surely there would be richer furniture and more litter of business there. Then, with a little nervous jerk, as of his internal machinery starting again after a breakdown, he felt how utterly absurd it was to be thinking about chairs and desks at such a moment. He must pull himself together, or he was going to make an ass of himself.