He could not afford to make good the damage done, and he had so little money left that he must find cheaper lodgings still.
He would be glad to get out of them.
The expense had worried him, and now the recollection of Mildred would be in them always.
Philip was impatient and could never rest till he had put in action the plan which he had in mind; so on the following afternoon he got in a dealer in second-hand furniture who offered him three pounds for all his goods damaged and undamaged; and two days later he moved into the house opposite the hospital in which he had had rooms when first he became a medical student.
The landlady was a very decent woman.
He took a bed-room at the top, which she let him have for six shillings a week; it was small and shabby and looked on the yard of the house that backed on to it, but he had nothing now except his clothes and a box of books, and he was glad to lodge so cheaply.
XCVIII
And now it happened that the fortunes of Philip Carey, of no consequence to any but himself, were affected by the events through which his country was passing.
History was being made, and the process was so significant that it seemed absurd it should touch the life of an obscure medical student.
Battle after battle, Magersfontein, Colenso, Spion Kop, lost on the playing fields of Eton, had humiliated the nation and dealt the death-blow to the prestige of the aristocracy and gentry who till then had found no one seriously to oppose their assertion that they possessed a natural instinct of government.
The old order was being swept away: history was being made indeed.
Then the colossus put forth his strength, and, blundering again, at last blundered into the semblance of victory.
Cronje surrendered at Paardeberg, Ladysmith was relieved, and at the beginning of March Lord Roberts marched into Bloemfontein.
It was two or three days after the news of this reached London that Macalister came into the tavern in Beak Street and announced joyfully that things were looking brighter on the Stock Exchange.
Peace was in sight, Roberts would march into Pretoria within a few weeks, and shares were going up already.
There was bound to be a boom.
"Now's the time to come in," he told Philip. "It's no good waiting till the public gets on to it.
It's now or never."
He had inside information.
The manager of a mine in South Africa had cabled to the senior partner of his firm that the plant was uninjured.
They would start working again as soon as possible.
It wasn't a speculation, it was an investment.
To show how good a thing the senior partner thought it Macalister told Philip that he had bought five hundred shares for both his sisters: he never put them into anything that wasn't as safe as the Bank of England.
"I'm going to put my shirt on it myself," he said.
The shares were two and an eighth to a quarter.
He advised Philip not to be greedy, but to be satisfied with a ten-shilling rise.
He was buying three hundred for himself and suggested that Philip should do the same.
He would hold them and sell when he thought fit.
Philip had great faith in him, partly because he was a Scotsman and therefore by nature cautious, and partly because he had been right before.
He jumped at the suggestion.
"I daresay we shall be able to sell before the account," said Macalister, "but if not, I'll arrange to carry them over for you."
It seemed a capital system to Philip.
You held on till you got your profit, and you never even had to put your hand in your pocket.
He began to watch the Stock Exchange columns of the paper with new interest.
Next day everything was up a little, and Macalister wrote to say that he had had to pay two and a quarter for the shares.
He said that the market was firm.
But in a day or two there was a set-back.
The news that came from South Africa was less reassuring, and Philip with anxiety saw that his shares had fallen to two; but Macalister was optimistic, the Boers couldn't hold out much longer, and he was willing to bet a top-hat that Roberts would march into Johannesburg before the middle of April.
At the account Philip had to pay out nearly forty pounds.
It worried him considerably, but he felt that the only course was to hold on: in his circumstances the loss was too great for him to pocket.
For two or three weeks nothing happened; the Boers would not understand that they were beaten and nothing remained for them but to surrender: in fact they had one or two small successes, and Philip's shares fell half a crown more.
It became evident that the war was not finished.
There was a lot of selling.
When Macalister saw Philip he was pessimistic.
"I'm not sure if the best thing wouldn't be to cut the loss. I've been paying out about as much as I want to in differences."
Philip was sick with anxiety.
He could not sleep at night; he bolted his breakfast, reduced now to tea and bread and butter, in order to get over to the club reading-room and see the paper; sometimes the news was bad, and sometimes there was no news at all, but when the shares moved it was to go down.
He did not know what to do.
If he sold now he would lose altogether hard on three hundred and fifty pounds; and that would leave him only eighty pounds to go on with.
He wished with all his heart that he had never been such a fool as to dabble on the Stock Exchange, but the only thing was to hold on; something decisive might happen any day and the shares would go up; he did not hope now for a profit, but he wanted to make good his loss.