"Well," I laughed, "I daresay I shall learn to pare the potatoes as well as Cousin Alf in time."
But she smiled a sad, wise little smile. I might joke, but she knew.
"And it's just possible that some time or other I may make a pound or two," I said, smiling back.
"There'll be your clothes and pocket-money," she replied.
So I was to be kept—kept by virtue of my masculinity, as one keeps a dog to bark. I was to be kept, I divined, somewhere in a suburb, in a house the smallness of the rent of which would be exactly balanced by the increased cost of the season ticket that would take me daily to my work, when I was "in." Even when I was "out" I was to be treated with a nice consideration, for she "never had liked to see Frank washing up—it looked so unmanly," but as she said nothing about cleaning boots or fetching coals, these things apparently were not unmanly. And I wondered whether the Alfs and Franks were more numerous than I had thought, or were becoming so. Small wonder their women treated them with almost contemptuous tolerance, blazing out once in a while into a row. And I now see that in this sense I wronged Kitty when I said she was one of Life's takers. There are always two sides to a thing, and on this side she wanted nothing but to give.
But, willing as she was to do all this in the future, I soon discovered that she wanted her small solatium in the present. In the matter of little treats and outings I did not compare very favourably even with her Franks and Alfs. As you know, I simply had not the necessary shillings. And so I began (I knew) to appear "near" and "close" to her. One Friday evening, as we left the college together, she allowed as much to be seen.
"Jeff," she said suddenly, as we approached the corner by the Oxford together, "do you know, you've never taken me to a theatre yet!"
Personally I have never greatly cared for the theatre; but it happened that I had spoken to her once or twice rather off-handedly that evening, and was not unwilling to make amends. Besides, the theatre might save a walk in Hyde Park. I pumped up a vivacity.
"No more I have," I replied. "Good idea. It's too late to go to-night, but we might have a walk round and see what's on."
She fell in with the suggestion gleefully, and we walked down Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue, looking at theatre announcements as we went. At the Circus we turned along Coventry Street, and presently found ourselves opposite the Prince of Wales'. I think it was La Poupee that was running there; if it wasn't it was some other piece that seemed light; and as I like, when I do go to the theatre, to be amused rather than instructed, I plumped for La Poupee as against Kitty's suggestion—some stern and ennobling tragedy. I had drawn my week's money that evening. It would be a sorry business if, with all those years of Alfing and Franking before me, I could not once in a while spare five shillings out of my eighteen; and so we elected for La Poupee for the following evening.
We went. We waited for perhaps two hours outside the pit door, but, as Kitty said when at last we did get inside, our places were worth it. When we were married, she said, we ought to be able to afford at least one theatre a month—she didn't in the least mind going to the gallery—and it would be something to think about for the next month. She didn't intend, when we were married, to get rusty. We were going to have our little outings like other married people, and if I continued, when we were married, to like light things and she serious pieces, we would choose in turn. And so on. I only half heard. I was spreading my remaining ten shillings over the week to come—ten shillings, mark you, not thirteen, for I had had to buy Kitty a ring, for which I was paying at the rate of three shillings a week.
Nothing happened at that performance of La Poupee. I am merely telling you this in order that you may see exactly how we stood, not at the crisis of our lives, but during the intervening stretches. I added to the problem of the coming week by giving a shilling for a box of chocolates, and no extravagance I have ever committed brought me a richer return than Kitty's look of pleasure. I suppose that really this was all that was demanded of Alf and Frank—a trifling, unexpected superfluity once in a while. Lucky fellows! I, however, was neither a Frank nor an Alf, my dreams were not the mere beguilings of an idleness; and neither during my courtship (my real one, I mean) nor thereafter was I going, in any woman's heart, to lord it on so little.
V
I remember the Sunday on which Evie, Miss Angela and I first took tea with Kitty Windus for two reasons. The first was that Miss Angela, who at first had begged to be excused, had come after all (knocking on the head my plan of walking back with Evie alone). And the second was Kitty's asking me to remain behind after the others had taken their departure.
We had gone at four o'clock; and even as the three of us had walked towards Percy Street together (I had picked the others up on my way) I had wondered what had suddenly come over Evie. She had seemed pale and jumpy and morose, and had scarcely spoken a word during the whole of our walk. Nor had she said very much more as we had eaten the hot muffins and drunk the tea Kitty had provided. Indeed, the greater part of the talk had been between Miss Angela and myself, and even that had languished.
Then suddenly Miss Angela had said something that had, I thought, explained matters. Archie's father, whose illness Miss Angela had asked about on the evening of the birthday-party, had taken a sudden turn for the worse, and Archie had been summoned to Guildford the day before.
"Well, we must hope for the best," Miss Angela had concluded. "There's no need to begin moping yet, child——"
Miss Angela also had jumped at my own explanation of Evie's moodiness—that now that Archie was in trouble his misdoings were forgotten.
I was to learn my error half-an-hour later, when Evie and her aunt rose to depart.
I, of course, had intended to leave with them; but as I held the door open for them to pass out Kitty said: "You stay for a few minutes, Jeff; I've something to tell you.... Good-bye, Evie dear. I do hope your cold will soon be well, Miss Soames——"
And she waved her hand to them as they passed down the stairs.
I swore under my breath, but there was no help for it. I followed Kitty back into her sitting-room. She crossed to the fireplace and sank into a canvas deck-chair with her back to the sewing-machine. I remained standing, with my hat in my hand, at the other corner of the mantelpiece.
She had allowed her head to fall back against the sagging canvas, and had closed her eyes.
"Sit down," she said, without opening her eyes, and, wondering what was wrong, I reached for her bedroom chair and sat down.
"What's the matter?" I asked, a little alarmed already, though I knew not why. I wondered if anything had been discovered about myself. There were, as you know, plenty of such things to discover.
Her eyes still remained closed, but her head fell a little on one side. It was not until I had asked her again what was the matter that she spoke.
"It's—it's dreadful!" she moaned. "I—I can see you haven't heard——"
"What is? Come, come!" I said, with some concern but more impatience. "No, I've not heard anything to take on like this about—unless you mean something about Archie's father?..."
"No, it's nothing to do with Archie's father. Oh, I can't possibly tell you, Jeff——"
It was on the tip of my tongue to say that in that case it was of little use my remaining; but she went on.
"Just a minute," she said. "You haven't heard ... about Louie Causton?"
I was certainly surprised. You will remember that I had not set eyes on Miss Causton since the evening of the breaking-up party, when she had danced twice round the room with me, sought me out again subsequently, and told me what the result had since falsified—that she was returning to the college in the new term.
"No," I said abruptly. "What about her? Nothing wrong, I hope?"
But she only sobbed, "Oh, Jeff!" and with her eyes still closed put out a helpless hand.
I had to approach and take the hand before I learned what the mystery was. I don't know whether you have already guessed it. I hadn't, but for all that my surprise, great as it was, passed even in the moment of Kitty's broken whispering in my ear. I had known Louie Causton for a deep, still pool; I don't think any revelation whatever could have added to my respect for her powers of irony and nonchalance; and yet when I say that my surprise passed it passed only to return. Good gracious!... I seemed to hear her carefully lackadaisical voice again as she had munched nougat: "So long since I've seen a man, my dear" ... and other circumstances, unmarked at the time, flashed on me now.
A child!
"Good gracious!" I breathed again in consternation.
My next thought was of Evie.
I was kneeling by Kitty's chair, holding her hand. I asked quickly:
"Yes."
"And does she know you're telling me?"
"Yes."
"And of course Miss Soames does not know?"
"No."
"She thinks as I thought, that it's about Archie's father Evie's so upset?"
"Yes; but perhaps she is about that too a little. I'm horribly upset, Jeff."
This last I took as a hint that the effect of this very startling intelligence on Evie was not the first thing to be considered.
"Yes, yes.... I see...." I murmured.
We were silent, and I felt Kitty's fingers move within my grasp. They pressed mine more closely.
"Don't leave me just yet, Jeff," she begged faintly. She was genuinely prostrated.
"No, no," I said. "Let me think for a minute...."
The next moment my brain was buzzing with thought.
I knew that only some such contact with plain raw actuality as this had been lacking in order to make Evie's transition from girlhood to womanhood complete. No longer now was she the fair young tree standing over its sprinkling of delicate discarded sheaths; this puff of Life's east wind had carried away the last of them. She had heard of these things, and so in a sense knew of them; but that somebody she knew ... that it should have come so near ... yes, poor shocked heart, that finished it. Archie's insupportable vanities had begun her enlightenment; the menace of his father's condition had touched her with the fringe of its shadow; and now this revelation had come upon her.
Mr Merridew's illness, moreover, had a plainly seen peril for me. I knew that if anything happened Archie would immediately have enough money to marry on, and my own labours—all that I had planned and done from the first moment of my loving her to this present hour when I sat in Kitty Windus' back room holding Kitty's hand—would go for nothing. They, Evie and Archie, would probably marry, and I—I knew this in that moment for a certainty—I, from sheer yielding, should find myself married to Kitty Windus the moment I could scrape the money together.
I gave a soft groan. I don't know whether Kitty supposed my groan the commiseration for Louie Causton.
Yet what else, if I had chosen a different line, could I have done? Nothing! My shrinking heart cried, Nothing! What was I to have spoken to a young girl of marriage? An Agency clerk—with dazzling hopes! A dweller over a sordid public-house—and a dreamer of visions! The possessor of a single suit of presentable clothes, the knees of which I was even now deteriorating past remedy—and of a heart tapestried with purple and gold, filled with an almost insensate ambition!
And I saw Evie only at all on the well-nigh insupportable footing that I was the betrothed of Kitty Windus!
Oh, if I had but had two suits of clothes, and thirty-six shillings a week instead of eighteen shillings, I think I would have cut the knot there and then and have sought Evie out that very night and asked her to marry me!
Then after a time I became more practical. Things, even the heart-breaking small things of my life, were after all slowly changing. One of these things was that my slavery at Rixon Tebb & Masters' was already promising to draw to a close. I have not yet spoken of this. Let me do so, briefly, now.
Once more I had been looking for a billet elsewhere, and this time I had excellent hopes of success. The post for which I had applied would not be vacant for six weeks yet, but I had forced a personal interview with one of my prospective employers, and had done what I had intended to do—impressed him strongly with a sense of my mental capacity. He had promised me his interest, and, unless he forgot it again (which, of course, was not impossible), I might have at least enough for one to live on before long. And once more my wider hopes were, I knew in my soul, not illusions. Soon there would remain only the bond that tied me to Kitty, and, with that broken, I would no longer envy even Archie Merridew that luck and weak charm of his that in the past had so often seemed more valuable than all I possessed.
But Kitty, lying back in her deck-chair, had opened her eyes again. They were full of softness and fright. She spoke.
"I wonder, Jeff—whether——" she said timidly and stopped.
"You wonder what, Kitty?" I asked gently.
"I know how strict you are—and if you say no I won't—but if I might go and see her——"
"Miss Causton?"
"Not if you don't wish it, Jeff——"
I considered.
"Has she asked you to go?"
"No—but if you wouldn't mind—very much——"
It mattered little to me, but I had to pretend to ponder deeply.
I really don't know whether I felt sorrow for Miss Causton or not. She was altogether beyond my comprehension. For all I knew my sorrow might be an impertinence. So I must seem to ponder.
"Where is she?" I asked.
"She's taken rooms in Putney."
"Alone?" I asked, with a quick glance at Kitty.
"Oh yes!... Until June or July, that is——"
"It is then that she expects——"
"Yes.... And I thought, Jeff, that perhaps next Saturday—we shall be out that way——"
We had arranged a little excursion for the following Saturday, the four of us—Evie and Archie, and Kitty and myself. We were to wander on Wimbledon Common.
"I never really knew her well, Jeff, understood her, I mean," she went on, "but after all I did see a good deal of her. It's horrible, when I remember the things she used to say.... And—and—you've made such a difference to me, darling—I wasn't going—to be married—before.... I should like to go, Jeff—just once," she begged.
"You wouldn't commit yourself to anything?"
"Oh no!"
"Does Evie want to go too?" I asked.
"No. She says she couldn't bear it. She cried half last night as it is."
"Then you'd call on your way next Saturday, and meet the three of us later?"
"Yes."
"Very well," I concluded. "You'd better go."
She threw her arms impulsively about my neck.
Then a change came over her. I think the change began with the failure of the supply of gas from the penny-in-the-slot meter. She had arranged for her little party a pink tissue-paper shade about her milky globe, an idea she had borrowed from Woburn Place; and slowly its colour faded. I had several pennies in my pocket. Quickly I felt for them.
But she moved closer to me. I was still on my knees by her deck-chair.
"Don't bother about it—just for once, Jeff," she murmured.
She could do it with impunity now. After what had passed our situation could hardly be commonplace, and our nearness was as little compromising as nearness ever can be. She luxuriated in her little perilous letting-go—could toy with, and yet be immune from, a danger.
Slowly the gas expired, and the firelight glowed on the blue and white check tablecloth and the disarray of tea-things upon it. On the back wall of the restaurant yard was a square of orange light which the shadow of a waiter's head crossed from time to time. I don't know that with some men—Mackie, for instance—her position would have been all she supposed it to be, but, poor heart, she had had little enough experience from which to surmise that. And I myself could hardly be said to be there at all. She lay in my arms; and in whatever false sweet fancies she lay endrowsed she was not alone. I had my torturing vision too. It was neither of her nor of Louie Causton, that vision. I was trying to persuade myself that she was another than Kitty Windus.
VI
Of our visit to Wimbledon on the following Saturday I intend to say as little as may be. When you have read it you will not, I know, ask my reason.
Archie did not appear. This time he had cause enough. The wire which was handed to me at Rixon Tebb & Masters' a little before Saturday midday (Polwhele brought it to me with a look that said plainly, "What next?") announced that his father had died during the night, and he had despatched it from Victoria Station on his way down to Guildford. Instantly my heart leaped.
Kitty was going to see Miss Causton. If, this new tidings notwithstanding, Evie would still keep to the engagement, I should have an hour with her alone.
I persuaded Evie to come. At first she obstinately refused, but I had the support of Miss Angela, to whom I privately whispered the desirability of "taking her mind off it." We left Woburn Place, the two of us, called for Kitty, and sought the Putney 'bus. Kitty left us at the corner of a street off the New King's Road, and Evie and I passed on to the bridge.
That was about four o'clock, and Kitty was to rejoin us near the Windmill at an hour that would depend upon the length of her stay with Miss Causton. She expected to be at the Windmill by five.
But at five there was no sign of her, nor had she appeared by half-past five. At a little before six I said to Evie, "She'll know we've gone on to the nearest place to tea, and will follow us. Let's go——"
Not far from the Windmill, on the Wimbledon side, there is a sort of small hamlet, with cottages and alleys and split-oak palings, and a refreshment house at the end of a garden. There Evie and I had tea, and there we sat after tea, waiting for Kitty. I talked of this and that, all very much away from the two subjects uppermost in her heart, and by half-past six I had given Kitty up.
"She's missed us," I said. "We may happen to run across her, but it's no good waiting here. Shall we take a turn before we go back?"
We left the refreshment-room, and walked among the gorse and birches in the direction of Queen's Mere.
It was a green and amber evening, with the shadows already deepening over Coombe Woods and the calling of homing rooks in the air. Here and there in the glades family parties still continued to play games with a ball that was quickly becoming difficult to see, and lovers appeared among the coppices. The blackthorn was over, and the may hung in sprays of delicate drooping buds; and in the south-west hung the pale sickle of the new moon. Evie and I, saying little, dropped down a steep over-grown alley that led to the mere, and it was in a sandy bottom at the foot of the alley that I heard a distant rasping call. Another call followed it, and then a throaty thrilling, and then another short series of acrid and moving calls.
It was a nightingale.
By the time we had reached the motionless amber-green water it had broken into full song.
I cannot tell—hitherto I have not attempted to tell—the mystery of that eve and of the song with which it rang. I cannot speak—nor would I if I could—of the responses that eve and that song called up in my heart. It was, I think, for both of us as if that bird's voice cried aloud all that we had left unuttered during the past few hours. Even Louie Causton, even Archie's father, had their part in it. It was as if that voice spoke of the feeble and infinitely moving wonder of birth—of the impinging of that relentless shadow that closes all—and of the griefs and joys and smarts and healings again of the brief passage from that unknowing to this forgetting again. All this crowded upon me in that exquisite agony of notes. And more came, until I could hardly endure it. There was no poignancy, no utter melting and surrender, that those importunate wellings did not give to the falling night. The unattainable greatness of Life and our own puny reachings forth for that greatness—Life's glory and the indignities of the miserable livers of it—Life's majesty and the nosings and burrowings of the fallen heirs to that majesty—all these shortcomings were reconciled in the song; and what man would be, that for an hour he was. I fail in expressing this; Evie, I am sure, did not seek to express it; but in that loud and lost and anguished outpouring, raptures and torments were folded together as in an Amen.... For one moment only I shuddered; I had remembered that but for an accident I might have stood by that water, listening to that song, with Kitty Windus, but the physical convulsion passed, and the bird sang on.
I had not looked at Evie. I do not think she knew she had drawn a little closer to me. Other listeners had been attracted by the melody, but we stood in a shadow, near a rill that fell into the mere. The water was nacre; the moon's sickle in it was a thin blade of amethyst; and I thrilled unspeakably as the bird's song changed without warning to long, low, caressing notes that drew the heart out of me as the nectar-bag of a floret is drawn from a flower. I heard Evie's slow sob.
Oh, might I but have crushed out that other nectar, to transmute into honey of our own!
Suddenly Evie flung herself on my breast, sobbing and strangling. Her fingers worked at the lapel of my collar; by bending my head I could have touched her small white knuckles with my lips. I was conscious that in my efforts not to do this I bared my teeth like a dog, but I remembered in time that to snatch was to lose. It was not my bosom against which her bosom heaved—it was the nearest sentient resting-place on which she could lay it. Her unhappiness and her happiness, her dream and her disillusion, her knowledge and her already failing hopes, rushed together in her sobs. Her love of a wastrel and her love for all he was a wastrel, and that hidden and sacred nook from which Louie Causton had ruthlessly ripped the curtain—for the pure strangeness of these things her tears gushed forth. I felt the long heave of her body.
"Come, come, my dear!" I said, with an infinitude of tender encouragement, close to her ear.
"Oh—oh—oh!" she sobbed.
"Dear, dear girl!" I murmured, passing my arm about her to support her.
But at that moment I could no more have said or done more than this than I could have sued for a favour by the bier of a scarce-cold lover.
"Hush, poor child!" I whispered, patting her shoulder. "Come, let's go. Let's leave that dreadful bird."
"Just a—mi—mi—minute——" she quavered. "I—I—love it—and I can't bear it——"
Even so did I love, and yet could scarce bear to hold the tender form in my arms.
Presently we left the mere, mounted the dark lane, and began to cross the common. Her hand was now on my sleeve, and it did not leave it again. Once her fingers made an impulsive little pressure on it, which, I cried sternly to my heart, I must not regard. But God knows the war there was between the sweetness of it and my fortitude.
"Jeff," she said more quietly by-and-by, using that name for the first time. "I—I couldn't have borne it if it hadn't been for you. It was too—too——"
"Never mind, dear," I soothed her. "Let's walk a little more quickly—your aunt will be wondering what's become of you——"
She laughed tremulously. "Kitty will be wondering what's become of you," she said. Then she added timidly, "She's a lucky girl!"
"Oh? Why?" I asked.
"You're so—so——"
We turned down Putney Hill.
I said I should say little of this, and I shall say no more. I took her home, but did not go in with her, neither, though I ought to have done so, did I seek Kitty. I went home, but all that I knew of my getting there was that I found myself sitting, with my hat and coat still on, on the edge of the bed in my red-and-green-lighted apartment.
They were turning out from the public-house below when at last I rose sluggishly and began to prepare for bed.
For half the following week I was outside and beyond myself.
But exactly a week, less a day, from that Saturday on which I had held Evie in my arms there dropped a thunderbolt into my life. On that Friday evening I had gone as usual to the cashier for my wages, and he had paid me; but as I had turned away again with my eighteen shillings he had said, as if giving utterance to an afterthought, "Oh—Jeffries—we find we shall not require your services after this week. You can have your notice in writing if you would prefer it."
And he had turned to pay Sutt, the next man in the queue.
PART III
THE GARRET
I
Poor, fussy, well-meaning Kitty had done it—had done it all unwittingly. In telling her vaguely where I lived I had left the number of my house unspecified, and when a letter had come for me to the Business College on an evening when I had announced my intention of being away, she, inspired by the urgency of my affairs, had got a directory and readdressed the letter to me at Rixon Tebb & Masters'. It was a letter from the firm into whose service I hoped soon to enter, and I examined the flap of the envelope carefully when finally it did come into my hands. Polwhele (I have little doubt it was he) had steamed it open, read it and closed it again.
This time all I could get out of Gayns, whom I once more approached, was that Rixon Tebb & Masters' had no use for an employee whose mind was already elsewhere.
It was true that the sack from Rixon Tebb & Masters' was not now a matter of the first importance. That was not the thunderbolt. Scanty as my wages were I had still saved up nearly three pounds out of them; and, as the letter that Polwhele had tampered with contained the news that I might hold myself in readiness to begin my new work a month from that date, the sum was enough to tide me over. But the letter had a postscript. This was a merely formal intimation that it was assumed that I could produce the usual references of steadiness, reliability and so forth. I myself never dreamed that I should be denied them.
I was denied them, however, by Polwhele.
"But—but," I stammered, aghast.
Polwhele referred me to my real employers, the Agency. I gave him a long and gradually lowering stare.
"Do you mean——" I began slowly.
"I mean what I say," he snapped; and as he turned away he added in a lower voice, "You ain't surprised, are you?"
And, remembering how I had seen him with his fingers in Mr Masters' waste-paper basket, I could not say I was.
Again I sought Gayns. This time the cashier flew into a passion.
"Confound you!" he cried. "You're more trouble than all the rest of them put together! What is it now? A character? Oh yes, you can have a character! I'd advise you not to show it to anybody, though! First leaving us—then coming back—then days off—then dickering with other firms! Go to Polwhele—go to the Agency—go to hell!"
I left Rixon Tebb & Masters' without references.
Without references my new firm refused to have anything whatever to do with me.
I come now to the deepest slough of my poverty.
It was early in the month of June that I was thrown out of work, with thirty-five shillings in my pocket. The drizzling winter had given place to a glorious early summer, and the days increased in heat until they became torrid. Men walked Piccadilly at night in evening dress, with their light dust-coats thrown over their arms; and ragged urchins hailed the appearance of watercarts with whoops of joy and danced barelegged in the refreshing puddles behind them. Horses wore straw bonnets, out of which their ears stuck ludicrously up; in whole districts the water supply began to be cut off at certain hours of the day; the pitiless sun gave every street the appearance of a hard, hot snapshot; and, as the heat got on people's nerves, the cries of children at play became intolerably strident.
My corner at King's Cross was well-nigh insupportable. Why the quantity of torn paper in the gutters should redouble the moment the sun begins to glare on London I do not know, unless it be that the fried fish and ready-cooked provision businesses suddenly boom; and certainly the refuse in which I frequently walked ankle-deep was mostly heavy with grease. Even had I been able to afford it, my "pull-up" had now become such a stove that I do not think I could have entered it. I dined, or rather supped, late at night, at one of the coffee-stalls where the electric trams now sweep round from Gray's Inn Road to St Pancras Station; and I breakfasted (my only other meal) on bread and the water I drew from my tap on the landing before it was cut off. The council didn't save much in my case by cutting the supply off. I filled every vessel I could lay my hands on early in the morning. As Miss Causton had once said, one must be clean, and Archie, whose bath I could now have passed my days in, was seldom to be found in his rooms near the Foundling Hospital now.
For three weeks I trudged the streets looking for work; and then a bit of luck befell me. The new "professor" at the college broke down under the heat; it was not desired to give up the Friday evening advertisement-writing class; and I daresay my anomalous standing at the place, something between student and pathetic high-and-dry "institution," was the cause of its being offered to me. I got five shillings for the evening, and that five shillings kept me for five days. I discovered that I need not pay my rent. The first week I missed doing this I made a shamefaced apology to my landlord, the publican, and discovered that he was not a bad sort. It was too hot to worry about trifles, he said, and so set himself a precedent that cost him pretty dearly until, long afterwards, I saw to it that he was not the loser for having harboured me during that time.
Wherever I sought work my inability to produce a character damned me; and on the other hand I was not a Discharged Prisoner. Two or three times I was taken on casually, once as a packer at a large furniture emporium, once at a stocktaking for bankruptcy purposes, and once (I forget how I tumbled into this) I spent a whole day locked in an upper room of a town hall, counting the voting-papers in some borough or vestry election—a lucrative ten-shilling job. This was before I got, and retained for some weeks (until I had the Corps of Commissionaires down on me), the post of hall porter at the offices of a sporting paper. I will tell you about that presently. You will see that I am making all the haste I can to have done with this horrible time.
Among other things, the general deterioration in my appearance had forced me to tell Kitty Windus that I was out of work. But I had made light of it, saying that, on the whole, it was rather a good thing, as I needed some sort of a spur; but I daresay Alf and Frank had said the same thing many a time. Presently my former boastings, about the great things I was shortly going to do, had committed me to the lie that I had at last found employment. It was my week's stocktaking that I told this particular lie about, and Kitty never knew when that temporary job came to an end. Nor, poor girl, did I tell her what she had done when she had forwarded that letter to Rixon Tebb & Masters'. It would become me ill to say that she stuck to me because it was myself or nothing for her; already I had begun to dread that it would be no easy matter to get rid of her when I might find it necessary to do so: and many a time, as my despair grew upon me, sweeping all personal reluctances and physical repugnances aside, I threw pride to the winds, and ate, in her sitting-room in Percy Street, the only food I had tasted during the day—becoming an Alf or a Frank in very fact.
For—perhaps this was partly the effect of the unrelenting heat—her insipid coquetries had begun to exasperate me more and more. I became increasingly petulant when I was commanded to "tiss eentie finger" and to look into the little scalene triangles of her eyes and say that I loved her. Presently, I am afraid, I began to cause her many tears. We wrangled frequently. I was "near," I was "close," I did not treat her as other engaged girls were treated, I never took her anywhere except for a bus ride, or to a cheap theatre once in a blue moon.
Then one day, without warning, she brought it up against me that I had "given her the slip" that afternoon on Wimbledon Common.
Of this I was technically so innocent, but morally so entirely guilty, that I broke out into anger, and there was a scene.
"I know some girls are younger and prettier than I am," she broke out, with unbridled temper, "but you did ask me to marry you after all."
"So I did," I admitted, in a tone that made her flame.
"Yes," she cried shrilly. "And not only that—I've seen you looking at Louie Causton too."
"Oh?" I said, noting with relief that her jealousy was not specially of Evie. "Well, there are one or two pleasing points about her."
"And she was the only one you danced with at the party."
"Before I asked you to marry me?"
"And me—you've never once taken me to a dance, though I've seen Rachel Levey offer you tickets."
"Perhaps you've seen me look at Miss Levey too?"
"And you never spoke to me, and sat behind the books with Louie."
"Well, there only remains one other suggestion for you to make."
And so on. It was degrading in the extreme. But I was sufficiently punished for it later, when she lay with her head on my breast, sobbing out phrases of contrition for her vindictive temper and supplication for pardon.
All, all gone now was the hour of exaltation in which I had heard the nightingale sing and had felt my glowing girl's breast heaving against my own. I was a hungry, desperate man, living a life against which I knew I should not be able to bear up indefinitely, and already glancing into the public-house as I entered by my side door and beginning to wonder whether they were not wiser than I who made use of the anodyne of drink. Why not drink, and forget for at least an hour? And one night, meeting Mackie again, and having eaten little, I did succumb, and for the first time in my life got drunk. I got drunk at his expense. He had heard the news of Louie Causton, and wanted to talk about it. I, like a cur, let him.... I broke away from him at last, but not until my loosened tongue had said I know not what.
My relation with Evie during this time is difficult to define. She never quite put me back again into the place I had occupied before that Saturday when we had heard the nightingale together, but newer preoccupations overlay this relation. Archie now had money (I never knew quite how much) at his command; but he still showed no sign of putting it to the use Miss Angela, if not I, had expected—that of entering into a formal engagement with Evie. Miss Angela found excuses for this out of her own imagination—that his father had only lately died, and so on; but I could have set her right even then. I knew how things were drifting. From the little I remembered of my talk with Mackie, Archie had found in his coming into money quite another opportunity. What might have facilitated his marriage with Evie actually delayed it. He was getting rid of his money in Leicester Square again.
So Evie's name was associated with his, and yet there was no plighting between them, and Evie swayed, now happy but with a fear, now despairing, but not hopelessly so. There was no trouble she could have brought openly to me even had she wished, but nevertheless she often turned to me significantly full of silence. She, Kitty and I often walked homewards together through the sweltering streets, and when Evie had left us Kitty would speak her mind freely about Archie Merridew.
"He's one of the Jewness Dorey now!" she exclaimed one evening, taking the phrase, I don't doubt, from one of her "better class" novels. "And it's no good saying it's got nothing to do with us! I think you ought to give him a talking-to!"
This was in the typewriting-room of the college, within ten minutes of the close of an advertisement-writing evening.
"What can I say to him?" I asked. "It's no business of mine." She little knew how much I had made it my business.
"Oh, that's just like a man!" she said impatiently, all aglow with the esprit de sexe. "The poor child's moping and fretting, and you say it's no business of yours! Of course it's the business of all her friends!"
"Of all her women friends, maybe," I answered. "Well, if that's so, why don't you and Miss Angela have a talk about it?"
"As if we hadn't—twenty!" she cried. "You and your bright ideas. It isn't fair—it isn't fair to Evie!"
"But what is it you hope for?" I asked.
She stared. "Why, that he'll marry her, of course!"
"Quite so. But I don't mean that. I mean, do you and Miss Angela think you can bring any pressure to bear?"
"Yes, I do—young idiot!" she broke out. "He ought to be ashamed of himself!"
And I didn't doubt that a certain amount of pressure might be brought to bear. If it was made less trouble for Archie to marry than not to marry, he would probably marry. He had not manhood enough, if it was clearly shown that marriage was expected of him, to hold out. And I knew how those marriages turned out.... I meditated.
"But," I objected, "why meddle? You know what a marriage of that kind would be! You see what he is anyway!"
But here I had touched Kitty's limitation. For her, as for her novels, marriage was the end of the story. If joybells closed it nothing after that mattered, and the look she gave me was a personal confirmation.
"But," she went on presently, "you could help, Jeff. We women can't talk to him—though he's not getting very many smiles from me just now!"
I smiled. "You're an unscrupulous crew," I remarked.
"Will you see him?"
"Well—I won't say I won't."
"But will you?"
"Perhaps—if I see a fitting opportunity."
"A fitting. Look!" Her voice dropped. Evie had just come into the typewriting-room on her way to wash her hands before leaving. "I'll tell you what," Kitty said quickly; "you go along with her now. See if it isn't as I say. Then tell me whether you won't give that little idiot a dressing-down at once."
She had quite forgotten that twinge of jealousy that had been the cause of our recent scene. If she hadn't, the more honour to her sense of sex comradeship. It was about this time that I was beginning quite frequently to forget that our relation was that of lovers, and as long as I could forget that, she had pathetic little magnanimities that I even admired.
"All right, if you wish it," I said.
So for once Evie's society was absolutely thrust upon me.
That night she was all that Kitty had said—plunged in despondency. She was, of course, "in love with" Archie, but that after all is only a generic expression. Even love comes down to cases, and I think that in her case, even then, she was wondering whether, had things happened a little differently, she might not have been equally "in love" with somebody else. Of that I myself had never a doubt. With Archie's money, or even a decent job, I would have flouted the whole world in my triumphant security that I could make her mine. And I should do so yet. Though for the present my power might go a-begging, I vowed that it should yet be taken and richly paid for. The dark and solid houses were less solid than that something I knew to be within myself, that makes and unmakes houses and streets and towns and lands.... But gently, gently; I was not out of the mire yet; by-and-by would be time enough for these boastings; things must go on as they were for a little while longer.
So though I did not speak a word to her that night that bore directly on the case as Kitty understood it, I did more. I did—I know this now—make her feel that, glooms and delights apart, she had in me an affectionate friend to whom she would not come with troubles in vain. I have been told, and am inclined to believe it, that I have this power with women.
And her eyes were soft with friendship as I left her.
"Good night, Jeff," she said fondly, as I took her hand. "I do like being with you sometimes."
And that night, as I lay half suffocated in the room I did not even pay rent for, the words rang like a chime in my head until the morning noises marked the beginning of another torrid day.
The commissionaire's job I spoke of I got in an odd way. I got it through the combination of my unusual size with unusual strength. I was walking along Fleet Street that day when a horse fell, and I, with others, helped to raise it again. When we had finished, a man at my elbow spoke both casually and penetratingly.
"That was as good as anything I've seen for weeks," he said. "Have you had much practice in holding a whole horse up while the others fasten the buckles?"
I laughed. I had certainly had the heavy end of the job, but "Not quite that," I said.
He gave me a scrutinising look. "Out o' work?" it seemed to say; but he did not speak the words.
"Here, come and have a drink," he said.
His name was Pettinger. He was a sporting journalist, and so a judge of "form" and "condition." I was not in the best of either, but I must have struck him as having "the makings" of I don't quite know what. He gave me a drink, which I didn't want, and a plate of sandwiches, which I did want rather badly; and he also gave me, as I say, this commissionaire's job. Pettinger is a friend of mine to this day; and since he is a simple and lovable animal of a fellow (he fully concurs in this description of himself) he is the only man I can bear to speak much to about that time when, clad in a sky-blue uniform, I kept the door of his newspaper office, touching my cap to proprietors, and being jocularly prodded by sportsmen and journalists, as if I had been an ox at Smithfield Show.
II
It was about this time that Archie Merridew's light was once more beginning to show regularly, evening after evening, over the leads of his top floor near the Foundling Hospital. This was after a period of months during which his abode had been in complete darkness. But as his visits to the college had become infrequent, and as I did not know what he might be up to, I had kept away.
When, some little after my commission from Kitty, I did look him up again, it was by no means that I might deliver Kitty's message. I went, rather, as a matter of attention to detail. There were certain things I could not afford not to know, and, more important, there were certain appearances I could not afford not to keep up. Nevertheless I did not dream with what consequences my visit of that evening would presently be fraught.
I was in a state of great nervous irritability before I went. The weather still continued almost insupportably hot, and to my other discomforts had been added a new perturbation that worked on me none the less that in all probability it was quite groundless. The evening papers had started a scare about "low-flash oil"; my red and green room was little cooler than a furnace; and I had lately begun to glance at my cheap lamp from time to time as if it had been a bomb. I mention this merely as an indication of the state to which I was becoming reduced. I thought of that lamp, I remember, as I walked from the college to Archie's rooms that night and half hoped in my peevishness that the thing had exploded in my absence.
It was only ten o'clock, but Archie was already in bed. He wore blue silk pyjamas and on a small table by the side of his bed stood a medicine bottle and a siphon; but when I asked him whether he was ill that he had need of these last he made light of them. It was this beastly weather, he said, and perhaps the beastly weather also accounted for his drinking the milk that Jane presently brought up in a sealed bottle. When Jane had gone, Archie, with an attempt at his old disarming impertinence, turned to me and said, "Well—how's the blue uniform, Jeff?"
Ah! He knew of that!
"Didn't think I'd heard, did you?" he grinned. "Well, I only did hear yesterday. Nothing to be ashamed of, old chap. I know one of your fellows, you know——"
I too knew the sub-editor whose name he mentioned. He was something of a bird of the night too. Already the fact that Archie knew of my occupation had set me swiftly revolving the new dispositions I should certainly have to make in my relation to Kitty and Evie.
"Ah, yes," I said. "I shouldn't attempt to drink with the sub-editor of a sporting paper if I were you. You've been trying, I expect," I added, looking suspiciously at him. He seemed drawn and ill. He never had any stamina.
"Sha'n't tell tales out of school," he replied, with another weak attempt at his old facetiousness. "Well, how's the fair Kitty?"
Ill as he was, I could have boxed his ears for the tone of it, but I answered his question, and he grinned again.
"Rare good sort," he said appreciatively. "Give us a splash of that soda, and pass those cigarettes, Jeff...." Then, lighting a cigarette, "Look here, you old scoundrel," he said, "I've got a crow to pluck with you! Guess what it is?"
I could not.
"Well," he leered. "I saw Mackie the other night."
You will remember what had happened the last time I myself had seen Mackie.
"So there!" he triumphed, after some recital or other that had for its point my single fit of intoxication. "Now what about it, you old humbug?" he demanded.
I knew I must keep my face and smile. I did not know why I must do these things, but I did them, looking at him and noticing again how sallow and changed he was. Then I looked about the room, mentally commenting on the evidences of the patrimony that had done him so little good—his new dressing-gown, his silver-topped bottles, and a new travelling-case, these things thrown anyhow among his older belongings. One of the newer objects I held in my hand; it was the gold cigarette case I had passed him; and I gazed smiling at it as he went on.
"Yes," he told me, with humorous accusation; "Mackie told me all about it—ha ha ha! What price the old puritan Jeff now? Eh? Sad dog, sad dog!"
I replied, quite calmly, that the dissipations of commissionaires were limited by their circumstances.
"And what the devil are you doing being a commissionaire?" he demanded. "I'll tell you what it was, Jeff," he continued familiarly, "that failure in Method seems to me to have broken you all up. What the dickens made you fail?"
I was conscious of an interior stirring of hate. What, indeed, had made me fail!
"Oh, over-confidence, I suppose," I answered lightly.
And he continued to talk.
At last I rose and said good-night. He raised himself on one elbow in order to shake hands.
"Come in again and see a chap soon," he said. "It's hellish slow up here all alone."
I was already at the door, but I turned abruptly.
"What do you mean?" I said. "Do you mean you're laid up? You said you weren't."
But he only gave a confused little laugh. "Eh? Laid up? Of course not! Can't a chap turn in early once in a while?"
"'Once in a while'?... But you said——"
"That you might come in and see me? Well, do. No harm in that, is there? Say I'm going slow for a bit, that's all," he added.
I agreed with him that to "go slow" for a bit was a course he might with advantage have adopted some time ago, and, though considerably puzzled, I turned slowly away.
My lamp, I discovered when I reached my dwelling again, had not exploded in my absence; but I did not light it. This was not, of course, through any actual fear; it was merely part of my general nervous condition. I remember, as still further explaining that condition, that I had passed a Board School that day as the children had poured out for their morning recess of a quarter of an hour; I have said how more than commonly strident the heat seemed to make all noises; and at the sudden outburst of the children I had broken into a copious flood of perspiration. I was not much steadier now. Pushing the lamp aside I flung up my window as high as it would go, drew out my old string-mended chair, and, sitting down, began to stare at the "Sarcey's Fluid" advertisement across the way.
The rippling of its incandescents had a trick that always fascinated and irritated me intensely. Before the last letter of the first word was an apostrophe, but its single bright spot always appeared out of its proper order. S—A—R—, and so on, the thing ran, but the whole legend was complete before that apostrophe started into its place. I used sometimes to watch as if I hoped the whole mechanism might suddenly alter, but, of course, it never did. I began to watch it again that night, while my ceiling and the wall above my bed became red and green, red and green, red and green....
I am afraid that what I am now about to say I shall have to ask you to take on trust. I have no evidence to offer of a phenomenon that, I am told, is shared by madness and genius alike. Nor will I trouble you either with any talk of prevision or of inner certitude, nor with the gradually deepening brooding that led up to this phenomenon—the brooding over the countless slights and slurs and rubs I had suffered from Archie Merridew's reckless and ignorant tongue ever since I have known him—my appearance, my private affairs, the side-splitting joke of Jeffries being in love. I will pass straight to the sudden and complete illumination that, as I sat there, so irradiated my intelligence that I wondered why it had come to me now, an hour later, and not then, the moment I had seen him lying at that extraordinarily early hour in bed.
It came, this flash of illumination, in exactly the same manner as the changing of the electrograph before my eyes—and, as you will see in a moment, with the same bloody apostrophe. And with its coming my room was not more suffused with the crimson glare than my mind suddenly was with the same morbid and flaming and dangerous hue.
I had suddenly realised what was really the matter with Archie.
Let me now tell you the kind of man I have sometimes, though possibly mistakenly, supposed myself to be.
He has aspired, that man, I have sometimes supposed myself to be, to the stars; but his feet have also known the burning bottom of the pit. His heart has been lifted up until sometimes, through eyes drowned with tears, he has had his poor and fragmentary glimpse of a larger Fatherhood than earth knows; but he has also exchanged intelligence with the devil. His heart has flowered with loves and charities; but that same heart has also been a rock with a toad in it. He was born in heaven, but has lodged in hell. So in him, according as he has been used, have opposites met.
And yet, as I say, I may be wrong in supposing that I am this man.
Yet the man who, in my red and green room that night, leaped up from his chair, and with a bursting, ringing cry shook his hand on high, was not the James Herbert Jeffries who now writes this feverish shorthand. He who writes the shorthand was not the same James Herbert Jeffries who stood, with those violent dyes flooding his face, vowing that if that sick young buyer of infected merchandise dreamed for one instant of doing that which it was sought to make him do, and which apparently he was ready to do, he should pay for it with the last thing he had to give. That James Herbert Jeffries was plunged in that hour into a place of stench and infernal brightness that God forbid was ever his destined abode.
I cried aloud, shaking my fist up at my cracked and blackened ceiling:
"Though Christ died for man in vain ... let him but think of it ... let him ... let him ... and I...."
After that I passed into a curious state of mind. You have heard how I make, when I can, anger serviceable to me, but here was an anger past my bringing into control. Yet, as ordinarily I plan calmly, so was I calm up to a certain point now. The result of these two things was that my brain worked like a worn and cranky machine, sometimes doing more than it ought, sometimes less; sometimes jerking startlingly ahead, sometimes refusing to work at all. And as there was thus no continuity in my thought, and as my recollections are curiously associated with that changing red and green that now for the first time seems to me to have run through my story like a fateful burden of jealousy and blood, I will set down such isolated reflections as rise of themselves out of the jumble of my mind.
Crime (I realise that the word leaps with some suddenness into these pages) has suffered more at the hands of criminals than it has at the hands of justice. There are few perfect crimes. Most of them are accidental, the mere explosion of momentary passion. And that is well, for the world wants few masterpieces in that sort. I have not read De Quincey's essay on the subject, nor ever shall now; but if crime is to be considered as an artistic medium, it is the only medium in which bungling is better worth to the world than competence. Other arts one prefers to see superlatively practised or not at all; but it is only of the bungled crime that man can endure to think.
The ordinary criminal begins at the wrong end. Dull fellow that he is he does not recognise that his first task must be the creation of an attitude of mind. Or if a glimmering of this does cross his inflamed consciousness, he thinks that it is the attitude of his own mind that is of the first consequence. That is why he suffers either the retribution of justice or the visitings of his own conscience. In either of these cases his act is unsuccessfully committed. He pays in common with his victim.
It is not the injured man who knows the full quality of hate. It is the one who injures. The injurer has no refuge from his own transgression; he has him whom he has injured constantly upon his mind—perhaps upon his soul. Another is the lord of his peace of mind. Thus it is peculiarly the wronged man's part to pardon, but when the wronged man would not pardon, but would avenge for another's sake?
Could Archie be given a mind more sensitive than a stone? Could his weak and spongy nature be hardened to a point of view? Could such an attitude be created in him that what otherwise would have been an assault would take on the stern justice of a punishment? Can any dull or egotistical mind be either punished or rewarded? Ultimately, can the God who created it do anything save quench it again? Wickedness may be vanquished at the last, but Ignorance——? And Conceit——?
But bah! Probably he was not even thinking of it. Perhaps he was even now seeking a way out. Well, I would help him. Ten words to him in private.... Faugh!
So that was it.... And the world allows it! Could he be proved to be merely insane at the time of his marriage the world would not allow it; a mental insufficiency beyond his control would be a bar; but this other, that he had deliberately sought, would be allowed. And Evie....
That bloody apostrophe again!...
The criminal forgets too much in the moment of action. It is a sort of stage fright. Rehearsed perfectly, however.... Not that the thing is not admittedly difficult. A button, a fingerprint, a drop of blood, the resources of the laboratory, the microscope, the spectroscope—oh yes, it cannot be said that there is not a deal to watch. And a memory, a chance association years afterwards, an attack of debility rendering the eyes subject to deceits—any one of these things may at any moment throw him into the hands of the law as a fate more merciful than that which he has not been clever enough to forestall within himself. Yes, there is much to consider; but then, as all the world knows, masterpieces of crime or what not, are difficult of accomplishment.
Ten words, then, on the morrow, and he would never dare....
But bah! I was not even sure! He could not be contemplating it, and I was vile to think it.... Still, prudence. I must make sure. Till then, nothing—not even these thoughts that ticked as if out of a tape-machine from my brain. To-morrow....
Yet, ah! I was sure for all that!
This red and green, this red and green!
These are such fragments of it all as I can remember. I don't know how long they occupied me. I had begun to trace with my fingers little patterns on the deal top of my table, patterns that sometimes had a meaning for me, sometimes not, but that always had a meaning for Archie Merridew if he thought ... if he as much as thought....
Then the red and green advertisement was switched off suddenly. Only a rhomb of dim gaslight on my ceiling remained....
But I still sat in the darkness, my brain taking those backward and forward jerks, and my lips muttering, though without sound, that if he dreamed ... if he as much as dreamed....
III
It was a "record" even for myself to get the sack twice in one week, but that now befell me. They gave me no notice at the newspaper office, but they were decent, and I had a fortnight's wages in lieu of it. Pettinger especially showed himself my friend.
"It's rough on you," he said, "but I really don't see that anybody's to blame.... Look here, I'll tell you what we'll do. Go down to my place at Bedford; I'll telephone them you're coming; and you can do what there is to do in my garden for a week or two until something turns up. You won't mind working under the old chap I've got there? Right. Off you go. You've got your money, haven't you?"
"I shall have to come up for Friday evening; I've a class," I said.
"Well, have a change till then. You look as if you need it. Catch the twelve-fifty, and I'll telephone them now."
So I took off my sky-blue uniform and wondered, as I folded it neatly and laid it aside, where they were going to find the next man it would fit.
This was at half-past ten in the morning, so that I had some hours to spare. Ten minutes, if I could catch him, would suffice for all I had to say to Archie Merridew, and, as he was not an early riser, and had told me that he was not spending his days in bed, I hoped to find him before he went out. But as the Business College lay on the way I determined to call there first. I walked up Chancery Lane into Holborn.
But he had not arrived at the college when I got there, and I did not wait for him. I had walked home with him often enough to know his unvarying route, and I set off for his place half expecting to meet him on the way. But I did not meet him, so I knocked at the brass knocker of his ivy-green door.
Jane told me he had only that moment gone out.
"To the college?" I asked.
Jane thought so, but was not sure.
"If I don't see him I'll call again," I said. "Tell him, will you?"
I returned to the Business College, and there waited, talking to Kitty, who had just arrived.
Kitty seemed extremely embarrassed that morning, and of course I guessed the reason. She had heard of the sky-blue uniform, doubtless through Archie. (For two nights I had not seen her.) I was none the less sure of this that she did not mention the circumstance directly; nor did she comment on my being at liberty at that unusual hour of the morning. Presently she said:
"I don't think he'll come this morning now. He may this afternoon."
"I can't wait till the afternoon," I said, glancing at the little clock on the mantelpiece of the type-writing-room—the little clock that had given the "Ting" that had startled me so on the day of the examination in Method.
"Is it anything I can tell him?"
That, of course, was quite out of the question. "I'll see if he's back home yet," I replied.
Then Kitty's uneasiness and curiosity got the better of her delicacy about the sky-blue uniform. She looked fixedly at her thin wrists and her fingers gave little touches to the lace about them as she spoke.
"Jeff," she said timorously, "I don't know whether you know what—what they're saying about you—I'm sure it's a hideous lie, but—but it's upset me frightfully——" She stopped abruptly, and seemed even then to wish she had not spoken.
"You seem very easily upset nowadays," I said shortly, quite ready to quarrel if needs be.
But she ignored my tone. "You know they're saying—everybody's saying—all the people here, I mean."
"What?" I demanded.
But her courage failed her. She stopped the fiddling at her wrists, and, giving me a long look said, "You know I love you, Jeff, whatever happens——"
It was what I had begun to fear—that there would be no shaking her off. She was far, far too faithful.
"I see," I said slowly. "I know what you mean.... Well, it was quite true. I was a commissionaire—until an hour ago. They've sacked me.... I suppose Archie told you?"
"Girl-faced little wretch! But, Jeff——"
I took her up. "Well, it's that that I want to see him about. But as regards you and me—if you want it to make a difference——"
It was a plain offer to release her, but I don't think she understood it as that. Indeed, her manner puzzled me entirely. It was eager, shrinking, wistful and apprehensive all at once, and she appeared to be trying to shake off something—something preposterous. Well, that sky-blue uniform had been preposterous enough.