moked several
cigarettes. He had exchanged a word or two of gossip with two or three
acquaintances. And he had stared moodily out of a bow window, and had
been rewarded by a vision of wet paving stones, wet beggars and wet
sparrows. He felt depressed and inclined to wonder why he existed.
Turning from the window to the long room at his back he saw an elderly
Colonel yawning, with a sherry and bitters in one hand and a toothpick
in the other. He decided not to remain in the Club. So he took his hat
and went out into the street. It was raining in the street and he had no
umbrella. He hailed a hansom and got in.

"Where to, sir?" asked the cabby through the trap door.

"What?" said the man.

"Where to, sir?"

"Oh! go to--to----"

He tried to think of some place where he might contrive to pass an hour
or two agreeably.

"Sir?" said the cabby.

"Go to Madame Tussaud's," said the man.

It was the only place he could think of at the moment. He had lived in
London for years but he had never been there. He had never had the
smallest desire to go there. Wax and glass eyes did not attract him.
Dresses that hung from corpses, which had never been alive, did not
appeal to him. Nor did he care for buns. He had never been to Tussaud's.
He was only going there now because literally, at the moment, he knew
not where to go. He leaned back in the cab and looked at the wet
pedestrians, and at the puddles.

When the cab stopped he got out and entered a large building. He paid
money at a turnstile and drifted aimlessly into a waxen world. Some fat
men in strange costumes, with bulging eyes like black velvet, and
varying expressions of heavy lethargy, played Hungarian music on
violins. It was evident that they did not thrill themselves. Their
aspect was at the same time fierce and dull, they looked like volcanoes
that had been drenched with water. The man passed on, the music grew
softer and the waxen world pressed more closely round. Kings,
cricketers, actresses, and statesmen beset him in vistas. He trod a maze
of death that had not lived. There were very few school treats about,
for the fashionable school treat season had not yet fully set in. So
the man had the wax almost entirely to himself. He spread his wings to
it like a bird to the air. By degrees, as he wandered--pursued by the
distant music from the drenched volcanoes--a feeling of suffocation
overtook him. All these men and women about him stared and smiled, but
all w