But on that Friday night I was restless. An absurd trifle had unsettled me (but I have told you how much such trifles meant to me)—nothing more than an alteration in Evie's way of arranging her hair. Until then it had been drawn back and massed in a thick little clump on her nape, showing beautifully the small round of her head; but now she had parted it (I did not think altogether more becomingly) in the middle, and had evidently been making desperate attempts to "wave" it. Certainly the change gave her at once a more adult air, which I supposed I should get used to, unless, as was likely, she changed it again in the following week. Her blouse also was new. It had a high lace collar up to her ears, and I didn't like it in the least. It was mere concealment, without concealment's charm.
I was restless. I had begun the evening by working, for once, in the senior classroom again; but presently, not happy where I was and not wishing to go straightway into the lecture-room where Evie sat, I had compromised by packing up my things and going into the room adjoining hers—the general room. The reference books were kept in the general room, and, presently, having need of one of these, I had crossed to the shelf and taken it down.
I ought to explain that these books were kept in three projecting bays, such as one sees in libraries, that stood out at right angles from the wall. Thus the books of each projecting wing faced both ways and between the bays there was just room enough for the short library ladder of three or four steps with the vertical staff to steady yourself by as you stood on it. As I could easily reach any book there without the ladder, I had passed the bay that contained it, and had taken up my place on the farther side of the wing nearest the window, where I stood with the open book in my hand. I forget what the book was.
As I stood I heard Miss Windus and Miss Causton come into the adjoining compartment.
I had no great interest in either of these women—I may say none, since I could not see Miss Causton's fluent hand; so, merely noting their arrival, I was continuing my reading when suddenly I heard the name of Evie Soames. It was Miss Windus who was speaking.
"... Oh, I suppose so; in her way, of course—if that's all men want!" she was saying. "Don't you think?" This with a little acidulous rising inflection.
Then I heard Miss Causton's indolent voice in reply. From the way in which she spoke I fancied she was eating sweets. It had lately struck me that she ate more sweets than both the other girls together, and if it wasn't sweets it was something else.
"Don't ask me, my dear," she drawled. "I don't know what the creatures want."
"Of course not. They do seem to want such—odd—things. The way I'm looked at sometimes—I declare it makes me feel perfectly ashamed!" said Miss Windus. Why she said it I don't know. It was the purest hypocrisy, and it was not likely to impose on Miss Causton, who had a nonchalant, still humour of her own.... But on second thoughts I don't know. I was not always sure, afterwards, when I got to know Miss Windus better, that she didn't really labour under some such delusion as this.
"Do they?" Miss Causton asked lazily. "They don't worry me much. So long ago since I've seen one that I've nearly forgotten."
There was a short pause, then:
"Really, they stare so," Miss Windus continued, "look one so out of countenance—one really doesn't know which way to turn!"
"No?" came Miss Causton's ironical dawdle. "Oh ... with a chance, my dear ... I should!" ... I suppose she smiled as she said it. While appearing to lay herself perfectly open she had far more to hide than Miss Windus had.
Miss Windus was shocked.
"You dreadful girl!... But really Louie, you must have noticed it. Why, you can see it the moment she comes into the room!"
"Really?" came the other detached voice. "How quaint!... Who do you think she's after? Not the Baboon?..."
I imagined the chuckle I didn't hear. I took it that the Baboon was myself.
"Mandrill, my dear," Miss Windus corrected. "You really must take a memory powder!..."
"Oh, I call it baboon," Miss Causton remarked with indifference. Then she laughed.... "How ridiculous you are! He's as big as a man ought to be anyway——"
"Oh, quite!"
"——and I declare you can look at him till he's quite good-looking!"
"Oh!..." (I could almost see Miss Windus' quizzical eyes.)
"Really, you are absurd!..."
There was another short silence.
"And by the way," Miss Windus next said, "he's been rather—different somehow—lately, don't you think?"
Sweets crunched for a moment, then:
"Different?... Do you mean he's been looking at you in that—ahem!—dreadful way?"
"What, that creature!..."
"Beg yours, dear——"
"I should think so!... But I fancied he'd been somehow—not quite the same——"
"Well, anything for a change, as the song says. Myself, if I found I couldn't get along without 'em, I should prefer——"
But a "Sssh!" interrupted Miss Causton. Somebody had come into the farther bay, and the rest for a time was whispering.
When next the conversation became audible its tenor did not seem to have changed.
"Scented soap in a little celluloid box, too!" Miss Windus admired.
"One must keep oneself clean," Miss Causton threw off. "Have some of this, dear. I simply had to have some chocolate nougat to-night!..."
There was a rustling of tissue paper.
"Well, it's a sign, and so's her hair-waving and polishing her nails and that lace yoke," Miss Windus resumed.
"Oh yes, the pneumonia blouse——"
"And her heels—and a scent-sachet!..."
You see that I was quite deliberately listening. I am not putting on any airs about it. I might have been Polwhele. I wanted to know, so I listened. I did more than listen too. I watched. I knew that the shelves were only half full on the other side; only a screen of stout wire separated the books facing one way from those facing the other; and by pulling out a book or two on my side I should probably find a peephole.... Very softly I pulled three or four out, found my opening and looked. Miss Causton appeared to be standing with her back towards me; I couldn't see her; but I could see Miss Windus, sitting on the library ladder holding its short staff, with her plaid skirt pulled tightly about one carrot-shaped thigh.
They began to talk again.
"And another thing that makes me quite sure, dear! She's going to young Merridew's next week-end!"
"Don't be absurd. You know what I mean. To his parents', of course; they live in Guildford.... Not that she told me, oh no! Not her ladyship!"
"Who did, then?"
"Not her, though I gave her every chance! Six months ago she'd have told me like a shot, but we're getting so blessed artful these days!... He told me."
"Then it doesn't look as if it was the Baboon?"
"Oh, I daresay she'll leave you your Baboon if you want him."
"Thanks. I think I should know which way to turn in that case," Miss Causton replied evenly. "Coming?"
And they left the bay together.
It was by this admirable piece of Rixon Tebb & Masters' work that I learned what, it appeared, I had been watching too closely to see.
VI
I had intended in any case to spend the remainder of that evening with Archie Merridew. Mingled with my restlessness there had been a tremulous sensitiveness that had culminated half-an-hour before in a fit of satanic pride. Lately (I had decided) it had come to be taken rather too much as a matter of course that our frequent adjournments after the evening class should be always to his quarters and never, or hardly ever, to mine. I had quite enough to bear without further gratuitous rubs of that kind, and I had resolved that I would make myself his host that evening though he had lived in a mansion and I in a sty.
But after what I had so altogether discreditably overheard now I had fifty other reasons for wishing him to come along with me. Almost every sentence that had been spoken on the other side of that bay of books had contained a reason. But I realised that before I could trust myself to face him I must swallow the anger that crowded thickly into my throat. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose by letting him see my rage. So I walked back into the empty senior classroom, there to remain until I should have got the worst of it over.
By half-past nine I had got myself in hand. I gathered my work together. Students were coming to the row of washbowls in the small compartment at the end of the senior classroom to wash their hands, and Evie gave me the smile that was to be my nourishment for three whole days as she passed with her towel and the cake of soap in the new celluloid box. Archie had been working all the evening in the typewriting-room; now was my chance, before he could make (supposing him to want to make) any appointment with her, to secure this myself, and I hurried for my hat and coat and sought him.
"Ready?" I said.
"Right-oh; just a minute," he replied. "I told 'em to keep my fire in—I'm going to swot like blazes to-night."
"Oh no—you're coming along with me this time," I laughed. "I shall be ashamed to show my face at your place much oftener ... unless," I added lest he should shake me off, "you love me merely for what I have——"
He laughed too. He was at the young and squab-like stage that takes a pride in scorning appearances, and even finds the heart more rather than less honest when the waistcoat over it is shabby. He accepted with quite a good grace, got his hat and coat, and we went out together, I giving Miss Windus an unimpeachable "Good-night" as I passed her, hardly a yard from the spot where I had peeped on her less than an hour before.
The electrograph opposite my abode was an advertisement of "Sarcey's Fluid," some sort of a disinfectant; and as we approached it Archie looked up.
"Phew!... Needs it rather, to-night, doesn't it?" he laughed.
It did not seem to me to "need it" quite so badly that evening as it had on some other evenings—warm summer evenings, for example—I had known. December had come in rawly, and the chestnut stoves and baked-potato engine were out. The poorer streets have no pleasanter smell than that of baked potatoes, broken up, sprinkled with salt from the big tin caster, and closed together again like a South Sea face with a mealy smiling mouth, and I had slipped a couple of these into my pocket for our supper. I suppose Archie meant the fried fish papers in the gutters and (as we entered by my side door) the acrid smell of the public-house; but it was part of my fiendish pride to rub those things in a little that evening, and I made light of them as we mounted the stairs.
"Oh, you're pampered, Master Archie," said I. "I had thought of asking you round to supper next Saturday evening—not to-morrow, a week to-morrow—but I think I shall save my hospitality."
You see what I was already angling for. Well, I caught my fish. Of course he couldn't take Evie down to his folks at Guildford without my knowing of it, but I wanted to see the fashion in which he would make his avowal. We had left the carpeted corner of the stairs that the great ornamental public-house lamp illuminated brightly and were standing on the bare landing outside my room. He answered without an instant's hesitation.
"Afraid you'll have to, Jeff—twice over," he replied. "I've got to go down home that week-end; beastly nuisance! I was going with some fellows over to Richmond—stag-party; but the mater writes that she's asked Miss Soames, so I suppose I shall have to be there to help out—confound it!"
I opened my door and let him into the red and green.
"Oh?" I remarked casually. "Nice change for you. You'll be all the fitter for the exams. Don't tell me about your stag-parties though. I know 'em; you'd take jolly good care not to pick the place with the plainest waitresses for tea, what? I know you!... But if I were you I'd go steady for a week or two, my boy, that Method paper'll be harder than you think, I warn you!"
"I'm watching it!" he replied cheerfully. "By Jove! Jeff, I'd forgotten what a noisy pitch this of yours is! What on earth makes you stay here?"
"Oh, I don't know," I replied carelessly, applying a match to the wick of my lamp and replacing the chimney. "As I say, you're pampered. The place is all right. I don't do much except sleep here. It's a bit cold, though. I'd keep my coat on if I were you——"
"Wouldn't be much sleep for me here," he remarked, sitting on the edge of my bed. "I should want a good stiff drink before I slept much in this racket!"
As I placed the lamp globe on its brass ring I glanced covertly at him. It was a green interval, and his face looked as if he stood by a chemist's window near the big pear-shaped green globe, while his waistcoat was turned to a black purple, with one brass button gleaming green as a cat's eye. Then the red came again, and the lamp flame crept up. I went to the little cupboard where I kept my few cups and saucers and plates. I filled my kettle at the tap on the landing, put it on the half-crown oil-stove, and began to prepare our feast.
In a quarter of an hour it was ready—tea, the baked potatoes, and a wedge of butter apiece. We ate it, he sitting on my bed, I in my sagging and string-mended old wicker chair. I saw quite plainly that already he wanted to be off, and would stay no longer than the barest decency demanded; but he had got to eat that pauper's meal before I let him go, and there were my forty-nine other reasons for having got him up there.
One of these other reasons had, during the last hour, taken complete shape in my mind. Its consequences would have been impossible to foresee, but as far as it yet went, I thought it crafty enough. I filched another look at him; he was burning the roof of his mouth with hot potato as he lolled against my bed foot; and I judged it time to put my plan into execution.
I pushed my own plate away and sank back into my lifeless old wicker chair. He had turned his coat collar up by this time. My plan kept me warm.
"You're a lucky beggar, you know, Archie," I sighed heavily.
He had moved, to set down his cup of untasted tea on the floor. He looked up.
"How?" he asked.
I settled myself farther back.
"How!" I repeated almost vindictively. "Don't you call it lucky having a house and people and so on?"
"Oh! Everybody has——" he began, but corrected himself. "I mean, I thought you meant some special luck!"
"Oh no—just that," I murmured. "Having a place to ask people down to when you want—that's all."
He seemed surprised. "Do you mean Miss Soames?" he said.
"Miss——?" I shook my head absently. "Oh no, I wasn't thinking of Miss Soames—I was thinking of something quite different."
He meditated for a moment.
"You have seemed a bit different lately.... What's up?" he demanded, looking squarely at me.
My plan, to which his last words gave a new and unexpected fillip, was briefly this:
When, over the case of reference books, I had heard Miss Windus make the very remark he also had just made—namely, that I had been "different"—I had had a swift access of alarm. In what particular I had betrayed myself I didn't know, but I realised very clearly, and doubly clearly now that the same remark had dropped from Archie himself, that love and a light cannot be hid, and that if my extreme former care had not secured me from remark no care I was likely to be able to take for the future would do so. I had laid myself open, and should do so again. How was I to cover myself?
I thought I saw my way. I invite you to consider that way.
Were I to give it out to Archie—or rather, not so much to give it out as allow a surmise to dawn on him—that my heart was already pre-engaged in some carefully unspecified quarter or other, not only would this "difference," both he and Miss Windus had remarked on, be admitted and accounted for, but I should at one stroke set myself free from a hundred other trammels of gossip, past, present and to come. After that avowal nothing I did would be unaccountable. I should have a definite place in the general sex-understanding. I should be classed, out of the running, filed and docketed, totally uninteresting to either Miss Windus or Miss Causton and rid of the attentions of Miss Levey.
And I should also—my heart had thrilled suddenly and poignantly as I thought of this—I should also be admitted at once to privileges. I should have my share in such freedoms and exemptions as the married man knows fully and the attached bachelor at least to a probationary extent. This state of things does by tacit acknowledgment exist. The man who can say all to one woman can say more than other men to all women. And the shining immunity I now saw before me would even include what so far I had had to deny myself—conversation, thus safeguarded, with Evie herself.
"By heaven!" my heart now cried within me, "I will do it!"
And instantly a perfect seething of the cautions and reserves with which I must do it sprang up in my brain.
But here was Archie patiently waiting for me to speak.
"What's up? What the dickens are you talking about?" he asked once more.
I let my head drop, as a man might who discovers he has said too much. "Oh, nothing," I replied.
Archie was just as sharp as—neither more nor less than—I wished him to be.
"A lot of fuss about nothing—if it's really nothing," he said suspiciously.
The next moment he had looked hard into my face, taken a long breath, and, suddenly bringing his hand down on his thigh, broken into loud laughter.
"By Jove! Jeff—I really believe—let's have a look at you—by Jove! I really do—I believe you're in love! What a——How ripping, I mean! Best congratulations, old chap—my turn this time—ha ha ha ha!"
I drew myself heavily up. The kind of thing I was doing has to be done rather carefully. "Look here, Archie—" I began, trembling between the wrath I felt and the not-too-much wrath I must appear to display; but he interrupted me:
"Well, that's a knock-out! Who'd have dreamed——"
"Why not?" I demanded sharply.
"Oh, I didn't mean that!" he made such haste to say that it was plain as a pikestaff that he had meant precisely "that."
"I only meant, how surprising—how unexpected. I mean——"
I frowned. "Should you find it so—if it were so?"
"Should!" he said, puzzled. "... Isn't it so, Jeff?"
"No," I replied; but a "No" that so exquisitely contradicted itself that I gave myself nothing less than admiration for the performance.
"No?" he echoed. "You're lying, Jeff—you are!" he broke out triumphantly. "I can tell by the way you say it! So that's it! Dashed if I didn't think there was something!... Who is she, Jeff?"
But that, as you may suppose, it was no part of my plan to tell.
Neither was it part of that plan to enjoin either secrecy or the other thing upon him. That, I thought grimly, might quite safely be left to take care of itself. "Mandrill, my dear; you really must take a memory powder!..." I seemed to hear Miss Windus' voice again over the bookshelves. Oh yes, if he would give currency to that Zoo nonsense he could be trusted not to keep the richer joke, of Jeffries in love, to himself!
For that he and not Evie had been responsible for this pleasantry at the expense of my appearance I had concluded by a much sounder process of observation and reasoning than that my love-lorn state predisposed me entirely in her favour. My watching, a failure in other respects, had at least succeeded in this respect. And that I had found had not been without its barb for me. You may remember my former pathetic gratitude that, while others singled me out for marked treatment, she alone had not, in the trifling forms and observances that are the gracious outside of intercourse as distinct from its inner truth, differentiated me from the rest of the world. Well, I had made a guess at the reason for that. It was, in a word, her upbringing. The aunt with whom she lived in Woburn Place had taught her to "behave nicely," and so on. I could see that education. Such maxims as that one must not "judge by appearances," that "handsome is that handsome does," and, generally speaking, the unexceptional tradition that the "less fortunately circumstanced" have special claims on superior gentleness and pity, form almost the whole of it. I, it appeared, was one of these "less fortunately circumstanced".... Of course nobody was to blame. By-and-by the amiable aunt would probably go a little further, and teach her that it is not enough that these unimpeachable precepts should be merely observed, but that the thought behind them must be concealed as well. When you treat a poor devil just as if he was anybody else you must not let it be seen that you do so from perception that he is not.... Anyway, there it was, and it rather took the shine out of that "good-night, Mr Jeffries" that had sent me off happy to Archie's rooms on the evening when I had been so startlingly shaken out of my fool's paradise.
Thus I was persuaded, and as it turned out quite rightly, that it had been young Merridew, and not she, who had allowed his tongue this licence both on Weston's physical characteristics and my own.
His cup of tea was still on the floor, and by this time was cold. He hadn't tasted it, and, his renewed congratulations on what he supposed to be my blissful state of mind over, was once more fidgeting to be off. But it was quite at my own pleasure whether I released him or not; I had the hateful advantage of my baked potatoes and my poverty; and though he was getting colder moment by moment, being less accustomed to the lack of a fire than I, I did not spare him.
"Yes," I remarked musingly by-and-by, as if I had been thinking over a former remark, "I'd take that Method paper quite seriously if I were you. Save up your little fling till that's over. Stag-parties and work don't go together, my son."
He had a little gleam of perspicacity. "What little fling?" he asked. "Who said I was going to have one?"
("Carefully, Jeffries," I cautioned myself.) Aloud I said cheerfully, "My mistake, Archie—I'm out of the running in these things—I'm rather a Puritan by necessity, you see. Perhaps I was taking it rather for granted——"
He chuckled. "A Puritan by necessity! A Puritan by Miss Whatever-her-name-is, more like! Do at least tell us if it's anybody we know, Jeff!"
But I ignored the latter part of his remark. "Well done, Archie," I applauded. "I'm glad you see that when a man's got one woman he's no need for all the others. Stick to that and you're all right."
And that clinched it. "Well, you've got the pull over me there," he said.
I made no reply.
You need not conclude, unless you wish, that I wanted to start him straight away to the devil. I couldn't have ensured his arrival at that destination if I had. But I was prepared to go half way with him if by so doing I could keep him from getting into paradise by the means I had reserved for myself. I was doing him no conspicuous harm. He would have to rub shoulders with the world before long—was already doing so; and I said no more to him—nay, I said far less—than he would have picked up for himself in almost any gathering of young men of his own age that he was likely to find himself among.... So presently, when after (how shall I put it?)—after having tapped it home that there was the one woman and also the others, I returned to the examination in Method again, I was talking as easily as if, his betrayals to Miss Windus notwithstanding, we had been the best friends in the world.
"By the way, that's another thing you're lucky in, my boy," I said. "The exam's in the daytime. I suppose that doesn't convey anything to you."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, it means something to me. I shall have to get a day off."
"Well?" he inquired.
"Well—it doesn't by any means follow that I shall get it."
He stared. "You don't mean to say they'd be such skunks as not to let you off for a day!" he exclaimed.
I laughed. "Perhaps they won't be such skunks," I remarked.
"Oh!" he cried, outraged. "They couldn't!"
He was as ignorant about Rixon Tebb & Masters as he was about everything else in life.
Presently, with a "Brrr!" and a shiver, he got off my bed.
"Well, I'm off," he said. "I didn't intend to come round, and I'm going back to swot."
I heaved myself up from my chair. "Must you? Well, wait a moment—I'll come down with you——"
Before I turned down my lamp, filling the room with the red and green again, I noticed his untouched cup of tea on the floor. I made no remark on it, but as I preceded him down the narrow stairs I found myself suddenly filled with a curiosity as to whether I guessed rightly what was passing in his mind. I had made my shot, and was as interested to know whether it was a true one as if I had had a bet on it.
Where the great public-house lamp shone brightly through the landing window the stairs branched, one flight descending to the side door by which we had entered and the other leading to the back bar of the public-house. It was as we reached this bifurcation that I found I had guessed rightly.
"I say," he said, "I'm beastly cold! Come this way and have a drink!"
I shook my head.
"Not here," I said. "Not on my own premises, so to speak. If you don't mind my having something thin I'll come over the way with you."
"Anywhere," he said, with another shiver.
There was another public-house just beyond the Sarcey's Fluid advertisement. We crossed and entered it.
"Rum—hot!" he called familiarly, peering under the frame of pivoted glass panes and flipping on the counter with a florin to attract the barmaid's attention. "Come along, Flossie—hurry up!... What's your poison, Jeff?"
He had his rum hot; but I drank nothing stronger than peppermint.
VII
His incredible gaucheries apart, I had no reason for hating him. One does not hate a youngster seven years one's junior merely because he is a mass of inexperience and self-sufficiency. Once again my hate was really a hatred of the whole dreary circumstances of my life, and, when I saw this concentrating stormily over young Merridew's head, I made attempt after attempt to divert it. I swear to you I made these attempts. I made them first of all to save him from a contest so unequal as one with my wrath must be; and if I made them later so that I myself should not be merely the slave of that wrath, I still made them. And all the time, as I say, so long as he did not stand in my way, it was a matter of indifference to me whether he took the upward path or that which led downhill to perdition.
Unfortunately I was in love, and no man in love can stand by the rules that he knows ought to govern his conduct. Those jealousies I have spoken of as torturing me at Rixon Tebb & Masters' shook me in spite of myself. When I felt their approach I took care to give young Merridew a wide berth; and I confess that in sometimes letting these fits have their way with me I found an abominable ease. Away from him, my heart was filled with rage and revilings; but these very outbreaks enabled me at other times to meet him with a smile on my lips and a welcome in my eyes. Once I had got rid of the over-plus of my rage I could almost have persuaded myself of my affection for him.
So I alternated, as the red and green of my apartment alternated; and perhaps the red seemed redder and the green greener by the mere force of the contrast. I continued to walk home frequently with him after the class, to share his supper frequently, and to be obliged to him for my necessary bath.
I very soon learned that in the matter of my reputed being in love he had done exactly what I had intended he should do—had whispered the news about the college. It required no further eavesdropping to tell me that; I felt it in the altered air. I saw the knowledge peering through the little scalene triangles of Miss Windus' eyes, saw it in the looks of sleepy and amused curiosity with which Miss Causton favoured me. The latter lady, indeed, sometimes positively alarmed me, for the glances I suffered when I chanced to enter a room in which she was at work held incalculable things, and I no longer dared to look at her own amused and supercilious eyes, her fascinating hands, or that foot beneath the hem of her dress, fine and slender as a violin. And with the least encouragement Miss Windus would, I knew, have sought my company, and, lacking an admirer of her own, would have eased her breast to somebody else's of all the things about love at large that she ached to say to somebody. I wondered, seeing them both, whether there was no middle way with women. The whole sex seemed to be divided into creatures (or rather a creature, for I set Evie apart) to be enskied by men, and the other kind, that a man might fly as he would fly a wild animal. And I am not sure even now that when these two things are found in one and the same woman they ever really shake down together. They seem to go on existing, independently, unreconciled, side by side.
But Miss Levey was far worse. She always seemed to me to crave information, useful or useless, from a mere acquisitiveness; and I may say now that it was she who, later, first roused in me the uneasy suspicion that unless I was exceedingly careful I should find that I had undertaken more than I could well manage. She began all at once to show quite a liking for my company. She mislaid books in the room where I sat, got into difficulties with copying presses when I was about, and glanced up at open or closed windows too high for her reach, as if she felt a draught or the lack of air, it didn't matter which, and must suffer until somebody came to her help. All this had its rise in the idlest curiosity, unless, as I sometimes suspected, she had made a bet that she would get out of me who this imaginary fiancée of mine was, and was determined to win it. One day as I saw her struggling with the blind cords in one of the window bays, and advanced to her assistance, she relinquished the cords, and then, as if to apologise for the trouble she was causing me, said, "Oh, thank you so much—you see I'm going to a dance to-night, and have a slight cold already.... You don't go to dances, do you, Mr Jeffries?" I answered that I did not, whereupon she said gaily, "Oh, you must learn! I'm sure you could find somebody who would teach you! Then you and your partner could join our set—such fun!"
And another time she actually came to me with tickets for one of her "hops," and pointed out to me that I should be saving a shilling by taking both a pink ticket as well as a blue one.
But while these were the results of my whispered false intelligence on Miss Windus and Miss Causton and Miss Levey, the results on Evie Soames were both foreseen and unforeseen. I had foreseen that it would give me a new liberty with her; but I had not foreseen that she, and not I, would be the first to take advantage of that liberty. It came to me entirely as a surprise that she should see no reason why, if my heart was engaged, she should not speak of it as a matter of course to myself.
This, to my great confusion, she did.
It was in the small back room that we called the library, among the book-shelves and glass-cases of mimeographs and gelatine copiers and patent tills, that she did so. I had seen her talking to Weston in the empty lecture-room as I had passed through to restore a book to its place—a new translation of "Schmoller on the Mercantile System," I remember it was—and she had turned as I had passed. I think she had been a little nervous about the pretty little exhibition she intended. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that she had actually practised the words she was going to use, and I am quite sure she meant to go through it creditably. My lady was even then looking forward to the time when, on a small scale or a large one, she would have to do these things. So she followed me into the library, and, with one slender hand on the iron ball-arm of the copying press under the gas said her little piece.
"Oh, Mr Jeffries!... I hear I have to congratulate you!"
For a moment I did not take her meaning. Then it dawned on me, and I felt a quick constriction of my heart that was both bliss and pain.
"Oh?... On—on what?" I asked. I couldn't help stammering a little over it.
She wore a brown cloth tailor-made costume and a thick knitted cap of white wool; and the shadow of this cap over her large eyes was not so deep but that I saw the almost reproachful look in them. It was almost as if she echoed: "'On what?' Can such a wonderful thing have happened to you and you ask 'On what?'"
"On this we hear of your engagement," she replied, looking down at her toes. "It's—it's true, isn't it?"
For the second time I felt my facile invention sitting somewhat less easily on me. I stammered again, while she, I am quite sure, misattributed my embarrassment.
"Who told you that?"
At that she was sweetly arch.
"Oh, a little bird, Mr Jeffries! Don't tell me it isn't true—it would be almost—almost like bad luck——"
"Bad luck?" I repeated foolishly.
"I mean, like wearing your wedding dress before the day, or something like that—congratulating you too soon, I mean——"
By this time I had collected my thoughts. "It isn't true," I said.
Instantly her face fell adorably. In its expression I fancied I detected both indignation against her misinformant and mortification that her dear little attempt at social competence had failed.
"Oh!... I'm so sorry!" she murmured, all dejection and shame and rich colour. "Please forgive me!"
"It isn't true," I said, "that—that I am actually engaged to be married."
Like a flash she was all eagerness again. She had a book in her hand, not a college text-book but a novelette; and probably the whole of the novelette was in her glad change of tone. I was not exactly engaged to be married, but I was in love, and I daresay her brain was already a jumble of surmises about obstinate parents, secret wills, marriages de convenance, and true and severed young hearts.
"Oh!" she said again. "I'm so—I mean I hope I shall soon be able to—I mean I hope I'm not rude if I——" She floundered, already out of her depth.
"Not at all," I said gravely. "I only said I was not formally engaged. There are—other reasons for congratulation after all——"
"Oh, then I do!" she cried impulsively, with a grateful look that I had helped her out. "I'm so glad!"
Then, her ordeal over, she glanced towards the door.
But a daring impulse seized me. This was on a Friday night, and I knew that on the morrow she was going to Guildford.
"I see you're just leaving," I said. "Would it annoy you if I were to walk a little way with you?"
Again the code of her upbringing banished her momentary hesitation.
"Unless," I said, "you have already——"
"Oh no!" she said, with quick frankness. "I only meant that I nearly always go alone, or else with Miss Windus."
"I'm sure Miss Windus can spare you for once. One doesn't get congratulated like this every day," I pressed.
She laughed merrily. "Some of us don't get it at all," she said. "With pleasure, Mr Jeffries."
I slapped Schmoller back into his place on the shelf, and went off, drunk with bliss, to get my hat and coat.
That night I walked with Evie for the first time to Woburn Place. Never had the Bloomsbury streets seemed so short, never the east side of the British Museum so few paces in length. I remember very little of what we talked about, I know she spoke of her visit to Guildford. The invitation, she gave me to understand, was really to her aunt, and it was to the subject of her aunt that she quickly returned when I insinuated a mention of Archie's name. I insinuated it again a minute later, but after that, noticing the way in which she came back to the aunt again, I forbore.
"But I'm afraid we can't ask the Merridews back, as we ought," she said, once more socially prescient. "We only have rooms in Woburn Place, you see, and you can't very well ask people all that way just to rooms, can you?"
"No," I replied briefly. I was thinking of my own late hospitality to Archie.
"We used to have a house, of course, before uncle died, and you know how poky rooms seem after that."
"Yes," I replied, compressing my lips.
And so we chatted. I forget what our other subjects were. I left her, with our first hand-shake, at her door.
What that week-end was to me I will not attempt to tell you. I did not belong to this earth at all. The fact that actually, in her person, she was enjoying herself in Archie's company at Guildford was nothing to me; the fact that every fibre of me was rapturously tremulous at the thought of her was everything. I triumphed as if I already had her yielding in my arms. Archie?... In my possession I laughed. I even felt kindly to Archie—felt towards him that it would give me pleasure to have him, by-and-by, a quite frequent visitor at my house—our house.... I spread the mantle of my exaltation over the draymen and porters of the place where I dined. Their heavens were not mine, but if a man is full he is full, and I allowed them sanctities of their own. My heart was soft and generous to them. For the first time in my life I knew what folk mean when they say they love all the world.
The sweet influence had not quite left me when on Monday night I went to the college to see her again.
She did not appear that night. Neither did he.
It was Wednesday before I saw her again.
I do not know what damnable difference in me that absence of the pair of them for a single evening made. It came over me so suddenly that I was in its clutches before I was aware. It was a significant transformation. Let me relate it.
I knocked at the brass knocker of Archie's ivy-green door an hour before the class on the Tuesday night, and found that he intended to work at home that evening. (I only learned this, however, some minutes later.) I had had a double reason for calling on him at that hour, and the blood comes hot again in my cheeks as I recall my second reason. I had recently bought a new suit of clothes, not in Lamb's Conduit Street, but made, though cheaply enough, to measure; and though it was only the beginning of the week one of the payments for this suit had already depleted my pocket almost to the last penny. Since breakfast that day I had not eaten. But I knew the hour at which Archie dined.
So nicely had I hit the moment for my self-invitation that I actually followed his hot dinner half-way up the stairs. It was only on the first landing that the servant stood aside with the tray to allow me to precede her. I knocked at his door and entered, leaving the door open for the dinner of which I intended to partake to follow.
He had brought a fowl back with him from Guildford, with one or two other motherly gifts, and I smelt the white sauce even before Jane put the tray down on a side table. Archie was in his brown dressing-gown, standing before his fire. He had taken the green shade from his lamp, and his low-ceilinged roof-chamber looked exceedingly ruddy and comfortable and home-like.
"Hallo! Good man!" he cried. "You're just in time—I was just funking carving—you'd better be getting your hand in for when you're a family man!... Bring another plate, Jane.... Well, how's things?"
It was then that the thing happened that still has power to bring the blood to my cheeks. It was exquisitely cruel in the moment of its coming.
"Oh, so-so," I replied carelessly.... "But I've just this minute swallowed my dinner, thanks. You go ahead. I'll watch you."
"Oh, rubbish!" he replied, in a tone that hardened me. "I'll lay you haven't had so much but you can pick a bit of Surrey fowl."
I damned the thickness of his hide, but swallowed my choler.
"Really, thanks," I said, turning away to look at a print on the wall that I had seen a hundred times before.
Jane hesitated. It was a long way up from the kitchen, and the old bell-pull of red rope by his fireplace didn't always ring. "Shall I bring the other plate, Mr Merridew?" she asked.
"Yes—bring it—he'll change his mind!"
But in my hellish pride I had now no intention whatever of changing my mind. Twice again he pressed me, and twice I declined, the second time curtly; and he fell to himself, while I sat in a chair and watched him.
"Oh, by the way," he said suddenly, with his mouth full of food, "I'm going to work here to-night.... Sure you won't have some pudding?"
I rose. "Oh, well, if you're not coming I'll sheer off; why didn't you say so? Enjoy your week-end?"
"Oh, first rate. But, dash it all, don't be in such a hurry—you're far too early yet."
"Oh, I've just remembered something," I said, "See you again soon."
And I waved my hand and left.
I did not go to the class either that night. I was raging again, and trying to protect that young fool from the injury of my savage thoughts. I failed completely. Not even the thought that my passionate resentment was a force to be confined as it were in a boiler, and only to be allowed to escape by the way that would prove effective, restrained me from clenching my fists and gritting my teeth as I recalled the image of his pretty and ignorant and conceited face; and I am afraid I "let go" utterly. I walked by way of Chancery Lane and Bouverie Street to the Embankment; I crossed Blackfriars Bridge, and after that I don't quite know where I went, trying to forget my hunger, and trying to shake off my hideous grudge against the world that threatened to crash over the head of the egotistical whipper-snapper I had left.
I have related this at some length because it was the first time, but not the last, that that devil of sensitiveness took me in quite that way.
VIII
I had not exaggerated when I told Archie Merridew that I might find some difficulty in obtaining from Rixon Tebb & Masters' leave of absence for the day of the Method examination. That examination was fixed for a Friday, a fortnight and some days after my refusal to set fork into that fragrantly steaming Surrey fowl of Archie Merridew's, and this falling on a Friday added to my difficulties.
Or rather I should say that it added to Polwhele's difficulties, for it was to Polwhele I looked once more to find a way out for me. For Friday was a wage-day, and since I must have my eighteen shillings in order to live, a mere covering of my absence would not suffice. The cashier would have to be taken into the arrangement.
But Polwhele had by now to some extent got over his dread, if not over his hatred, of me. When I put the matter to him he refused. This was in the street, during the luncheon hour. The louse refused to help me, and turned away.
Exactly fifteen minutes later I had bearded the cashier himself, catching him at the door as he was returning from his meal.
At first he looked at me as much as to say, "Did I speak to you"? Then, finding it impossible to pretend he didn't know who I was, he said, "What is it?"
I told him what I wanted, concealing only my reason for wanting it; and, after his first astonishment that I had taken the absolutely unprecedented course of addressing a request otherwise than through the usual channel, I found him not unmanageable. As a matter of fact, things were slack, and there was only one kind of labour that Rixon Tebb & Masters' would have preferred to that it had from the agency at eighteen shillings a week—namely, a "floating margin" waiting on the pavement to be taken on for an hour or two as it might be required. Gayns saw a chance of saving a day.
"You don't expect to be paid for that day, do you?" he said.
"No," I replied.
He thought for a moment. "All right," he said. "You can come for your fifteen shillings on Thursday night."
And Polwhele set another mark against me, that I had approached a superior over his head.
As I entered the Business College at half-past ten on the morning of the examination it suddenly struck me that I had never been inside the place in the daytime before. By gaslight it was, as I have said, dingy enough, but by daylight it was shabby in the extreme. I walked round the rooms, noticing for the first time that the shorthand and typewriting rooms, which looked on the side street to the east of the block, were by far the lightest rooms on our top floor, and that the library in which I had received Evie's congratulations was little more than a thick twilight, which the cleaning of the single grimy back window that looked out over yards and chimney-pots would probably not greatly have improved. The room adjoining that, the old ledger-room, was not, except for the small high square of glass that gave on the head of the stairs, lighted at all.
They had made, too, quite extensive arrangements for the occasion itself. We had been warned that we should not be allowed to leave the premises until the examination was over, and as far as possible separate spaces had been provided for each of the twenty-five candidates—compartments of screens hired for the day from some furnisher or shop-fitter, and open at the ends to the gaze of the half-dozen perambulating guardians of the probity of examinations who looked as if they too had been had in for the day on the same terms as the screens. The contrast between the new fittings and the old wallpapers and chandeliers struck me. And I remembered that even now, when I had been debited my three shillings to be present, I did not see the place in its normal daytime aspect at all.
The papers were to be distributed at eleven, and at a few minutes before that hour we were all assembled. A man called Mackie and myself were the only two candidates for the Honours paper, and he and I were kept well apart—I told off to a seat in the middle of the lecture-room, he isolated in the typewriting-room. Evie, timorous about her Elementary, was separated from Archie Merridew (who occupied the box between Miss Windus and a pale student, Richardson) by the whole length of the general room. We took our places; in all the rooms at once voices were heard reading some cautionary form or other (my policeman gave me the most mistrustful of glances as he pronounced the words "expelled from the examination-room and your paper cancelled"); the papers were distributed on the stroke of eleven, and the examination began.
I need not trouble you with what it was all about. The importance of that day to me was quite unconnected with the paper on Method. I ought, however, to say that the paper was in reality two papers, the first in Theory and the second in Practice, with the interval for lunch dividing the two. I mention this only to explain how it was we came to be all talking together when, a little after half-past one, our first papers had been collected and we were free to unsnap our satchels or untie our parcels of lunch.
Despite my reduced income that week I had provided myself with a sumptuous lunch—two kinds of sausage from a delicatessen shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, a paper of potato salad, a roll, butter, some sort of chocolate baba or moka, and a bottle of Schweppes' dry ginger ale. That lunch had cost me nearly three shillings—but I intended to eat only a third of it. The rest was to be my chief sustenance during the two following days. I was not among my porters and drivers now—oh no! I was cutting quite a dash. Archie, passing with Miss Windus as I opened my black satchel, did not forbear to remark, "By Jove! doesn't Jeffries do himself well, what?" and it had been in order that I might be assumed to "do" myself equally well every day of my life that I had made my little display. I ate my exact third in the same compartment I had written my examination paper in, and then, closing my bag on the precious remainder, put it under the seat and mingled with the others.
By a sort of natural selection, I presently found myself in the middle bow window, discussing the questions he had just answered with my only fellow-candidate in Honours, Mackie. Mackie, both at the college and elsewhere, was one of these blatantly popular chaps, and I myself didn't like him. In some respects he was rather of Archie's kind, but he was older, more knowing, and had gone further. He was a singer of comic songs at "smokers," and a frequent looker-in at the shilling dances at the Holburn Town Hall after class. He was jubilant over the ease of the Theory paper, and was already so confident of his pass that he was cracking jokes right and left, as if a weight had been taken off his mind.
"It's going to be like money from home if it's no harder than that!" he exulted (almost prophetically, if what I said about the standard of modern examinations is true). "Kitty Windus says she'll eat her mackintosh, with the accent on the 'tosh,' if she isn't all right for the Advanced, and the Elementaries are as safe as your hand in your pocket! What ho! Come out on the stairs and have a Flor de Cabbagos."
I didn't want the Flor de Cabbagos, but I went out on the top landing with him. One or two others were smoking on the floor below, which was as far as we were allowed to stray. A few steps down Miss Windus and Miss Causton were sitting on the stairs, as if they were sitting out a dance, and Miss Causton moved lower down still as the fragrance of Mackie's "Flor" reached her, and then a little way back again as she caught the whiff that came up the well. Mackie was talking of the paper again.
"All that mugging for a job you could do on your head!" he said, with regret for the time he had lost. "I wouldn't have dropped out of the billiard handicap if I'd known! Play billiards, Jeffries? I'm a regular John Roberts—in my dreams. Give you fifty in a hundred at the Napier when teacher says we can go."
And he ran on, with dull facetiousness.
But suddenly he stopped his rapid flow. He made a slight movement with his finger, and stood listening. I heard nothing except the voices lower down the stairs and the general hum in the room we had just left. But Mackie did.
"Hear that?" he said.
"What?" I asked.
"Sssh!..."
I told you how the wooden partition at the head of the stairs, that with the small window high up, separated the landing on which we stood from the old ledger-room. The window was worked with cords on a horizontal pivot, and was swung partly open. Whether Mackie heard whatever he did hear through this window or through the boards themselves I do not know, but a smile came over his face.
"It's that young devil," he whispered.
"Why, young Merridew. He's in there with somebody...."
I invite you to notice that I was improving. I was not eavesdropping this time—I was merely letting Mackie do my eavesdropping for me. He glanced round to see whether the women below were watching, and then set his ear against the partition.
"Yes, it's Merridew," he chuckled. "Nice father's hope and mother's joy that young man's getting! I don't suppose he's gone in there to talk to the secretary bird!..."
I found myself suddenly reminded of what I had noticed for the first time only an hour or two before—that the room beyond the partition was practically unlighted.
Then Mackie dropped again into the "bright" style affected by the singers of comic songs at smoking concerts.
"Ahem—good-hevening, ladies and gen'lmen! How am I? Very well, thank me! Ahem! I will now, with your kind permission, endeavour to entertain you with a few of my well-known impersonations on a subject that will appeal to all of you, no matter what your age, sex, condition, vaccination marks or the number of your dog licence—London's Lovers."
"Oh, Mr Mackie's going to recite for us!" I heard Miss Windus' cry of juvenile delight from down the stairs. "Please be quick, Mr Mackie—we shall have to go in in ten minutes!"
And those below pressed up the stairs to hear Mackie.
But I did not stay to hear the "impersonation." I walked back into the general room, and, with a violently throbbing heart, sought the seat where I had written my examination paper.
Do you realise what I had just seen? Do you see what had set my heart so thumping? If Mackie was right, and he had really got the cue for his "impersonation" from something that was going on in the ledger-room, young Merridew and Evie were alone in there together.
All that I had hitherto known of apprehension and despair and jealousy of Archie's luck and chances and juniority was eclipsed by the emotion that now flowed over me like a wave. The revelation swept me entirely off my balance. It seemed to me that once more I awoke as if out of a dream. I seemed to be standing as it were a little way off from my own baseless hopes and illusions of the past weeks and coldly contemplating my own egregiousness. I actually gave out loud a low laugh that harrowed myself. What! To suppose that all, all I could do, would prevent youth from coming together at the last!
So I made myself a spectacle of ridicule for myself.
Then, as the minutes passed, that which at first had seemed a pure and perfect whole of hopelessness changed subtly and began to separate into parts. And that brought such a change in me that I trembled to recognise it. The shock of those first moments had stunned me, but I was now coming out of my stupor. My first swift conclusion had been wrong. These were not young lovers whom mountains could not sunder. She, my sleeping beauty, who had but now opened her eyes, no doubt thought I was that; her soul was over-brimming; and I remembered her look of wonder and reproach when, after she had congratulated me on that love-rise that is the most wondrous of earthly dawnings I had given a puzzled "on what?" When hearts can no longer contain that with which they ache to bursting, lucky is the one who stands nearest to hand. His it is to have, for the lifting of his finger, what else would spill. He may not be athirst for the draught; a muddier liquor might quench his fire as well; but this dew and ichor is his, though another parch for it.
For I needed no pointers from Mackie to know young Archie now. This was his ignored and heaven-high luck, and he did not even want it. If their being together in that unlighted room—their being together even as I sat with my head between my hands staring blankly at the yellow deal screen—if this meant anything at all it meant one thing and one thing only, that she must give because it was her nature to give, and the cub was philandering with her.
At that thought my despair gave place to something else. It was eaten up in the white flame of wrath that flashed like a brand in my brain.
"Oh!" I thought. "So that's it, my Archie?..."
I need not tell you again how I always have made my angers serviceable to me. Five minutes later—though my will was well-nigh deracinated in the process—I was its master again. It still struggled like a beast in my hold, nor did I know whence the help could come without which it would presently have me in its power again, but I still retained my throttling hold on it. One last wild struggle the beast made; this was when beyond the end of my screen-enclosed compartment, I saw them issue, with an interval of half-a-minute between their coming out of the library doorway. He was pink and triumphant; at her I forbore to look. A minute later Mackie passed and gave an infinitesimally small jerk of his head and a wink; but by that time I was holding my savage beast down again.
Then a bell rang; there was a buzz and movement the candidates were making ready again. Once more attendants read the caution, and then the second paper was distributed. Mechanically I turned over the gelatine-copied leaves that had been handed to me.
But I pushed them away again. A man who is engaged as I still was—a luckless hunter who has missed his shot and is struggling desperately body to body with his intended prey—has little time for anything but the business in hand. True, I did draw the paper to me again and tick off the questions that would be productive of the highest marks, but it was long before I got any further. There would come between me and my page Archie Merridew's pink and boastful face as I had seen him issue from the library door.
I do not know how long I sat thus.
Draggingly at last I settled to work. But it was well-nigh hopeless. I came to myself after a long interval to find that I was staring blankly before me and muttering softly to myself. I had not written more than half-a-page. Wearily I tried again.
The next external thing that I was fully awake to was that from the typewriting-room there came the single "Ting" of the small clock on the mantelpiece. I started. That single "Ting" always meant one of two things—one o'clock or a half-hour. I had no watch.
I tried for a moment to persuade myself that the clock had just struck half-past two.
Then I heard the attendant's voice: "You have one hour left."
"Good heavens!" I groaned.
I drew my paper to me again.
For a time I was not conscious of anything but the questions that must be answered by half-past four. Indeed, so feverishly did I work that I did not hear the attendants announce that we had only half-an-hour longer. The next announcement I heard was that fifteen minutes only remained.
Swiftly and flurriedly I turned over what I had written. I was just half-way through the paper.
Wildly alarmed, I broke into rapid shorthand—the shorthand in which I am writing this now. I did not know whether the shorthand would be accepted; I only knew that in its larger aspect the object of the examination was to determine whether I was master of my subject. I was master of my subject. Those already diluted tests of capacity, the questions, dictated their own replies: I put on top speed.
"You have five minutes more," sounded the relentless voice.
But I could have sworn that not one minute elapsed before, much louder and more peremptory, came the final call:
"You must now cease writing!"
As I mingled with my fellow-candidates again I heard Mackie crying joyously, "Oh, we got medals for this in Paris!" But I passed him by without a glance. Nor had I any desire to linger about those premises my first sight of which in the daytime had cost me three shillings in cash, and a murderous rage that might indeed have closed the gates of heaven in my face. I went quickly for my hat and coat, almost colliding with Miss Causton as I turned a corner and muttering I know not what as she shrank back and gave me a look that I could hardly reconcile with her usually ironical and ruminating eyes. I merely wanted to get out of the place....
But I did not escape so quickly but that I saw Archie and Evie following me down the stairs. No doubt they were going together to her aunt's to tea.
A week later I learned that I had passed with distinction in the Theory part of the paper, but had failed in the Practice portion. The examiners made a joke about "Paper Number Two," saying they had decided to hold it over for next year's shorthand examination. Everybody knew whose paper Number Two was....
Mackie had passed in both portions.