"Who've b—ee—een—my lads!And s—ee—een—my lads!"
"Who've b—ee—een—my lads!And s—ee—een—my lads!"
"Who've b—ee—een—my lads!
And s—ee—een—my lads!"
Talk in that uproar was impossible, and again there enwrapped us that strong sense of rich and rough and abundant life. As we leaned over our little table to watch, Evie's finger was moving in time to the song, and even the thought of the little house a few hundred yards away disappeared for a moment from my own mind. A chair with a couple of girls upon it broke, and there were shrieks and applause and whistles and laughter; and then the song beganto die away. Cheers followed it, and cheers again, for throats cheered readily then; and then our neighbours of the next table formed themselves into single file, and, with a last shrill
"Who've b—ee—een—my lads!And s—ee—een—my lads!"
"Who've b—ee—een—my lads!And s—ee—een—my lads!"
"Who've b—ee—een—my lads!
And s—ee—een—my lads!"
marched round the garden and out into the crowds beyond. I seized my opportunity. Evie and I followed them, I with her tucked safely away under my arm; and we joined the dense stream that was already pouring southwards. And as I struggled for places on a bus at Hampstead Heath Station, my heart was grateful for that illusion of the day that had banished, first, the remnant of Evie's sorrow, and had afterwards cut short that impossible course of unmeasured confidences to which that moodiness had given rise.
I began to foresee those inconveniences that afterwards made me hate that house in the Vale of Health as soon as I had signed my contract and got the key. The contract was for a year only, and as for any period less than three years the agents had refused to "do up" the place for me, I became plasterer, painter and plumber myself. I suppose that from the strictly conventional point of view Evie ought to have had no hand in this; indeed, she read me, from the "Etiquette" column of one of her weekly papers, a passage that informed me that between her choice of a house and her going into it as its mistress in the eyes of all the world a bride-elect ought to betray no knowledge of that house's existence; but as she delivered this from over the bib of an enormous apron, holding the journal in one hand, while the fingers of the other rubbed the lumps out of a bucket of whitewash, the knowledge came too late to be of much use. Anyway, there we were, with Miss Angela or an old charwoman or else nobody at all for chaperon, scraping walls, mixing paint, puttying cracks, fixing shelves, dragging at obstinate old nails; and seeing that from the point of view of Etiquette we were already numbered with the lost, we made nobones about walking into a shop in Tottenham Court Road together and brazenly asking to be shown the bedstead department. After that we took tea, with never a human eye upon us, in my lofty room near the Cobden Statue. Doubtless this cut us off finally from that dim eschatological hope when even the devil shall have his respite of a thousand years. Our only solace was that we found ourselves in the company of a good many others who have to square their Etiquette with their opportunities as best they can.
But about those inconveniences. Why, with the whole Heath before them, the children on their way to or from school should make our doorstep their playground I didn't know; but they did, and it needed no gift of prophecy to see that when the schools closed later in the summer they would be an almost hourly nuisance. That was the first thing that struck me. Next, the crown of my head was like to be sore from many bumpings before I had learned to avoid the bathroom floor as I mounted our creaking, turning stairs. Next, ready as I should have been to secure my own garden from overlooking had I had one, I resented that screen of trellis that limited the view from our little balcony to the slope of hillside opposite. Add to these that not a window-sash fitted within half or three-quarters of an inch, that not a door was truly hung, that, wherever I wanted to make good a hinge or fastening, the woodwork wassoft as a mushroom with old screwholes, and that I should have ruined a whole shopful of tools had I even attempted to level our splintery old floor, and you will see why I rejoiced to think that our tenancy might not be a very long one. But I need hardly add that, after all, these things weighed but a trifle against my impatience, and that I was careful not to let Evie suppose that I did not think our little nook the most delightful spot imaginable.
As a matter of fact I was compelled to leave a large part of the work to Evie; and capitally she did it. She had forgotten her old smattering of business training so completely that she always found it easier to go through her day's duties than she did to balance her expenditure afterwards in the highly ornamental "Housekeeper's Book" I bought for her; and while I was allowed my way in such unimportant things as where we should put our old-fashioned chests of drawers and Sheffield caddies and those sketches of Billy Izzard's, the department that began with the frying-pan and ended with general cleaning was hers. I had given her a second key, not only of the new house, but also of my own quarters in Camden Town; and sometimes at the F.B.C. I would look up from my work, gaze past the Duke of York's Column with its circling pigeons and away over the Mall, and wonder what she was doing now—taking our new dinner-service from its crates and washing it, peeping down the long cylinder of kitchenlinoleum and wishing I was there to cut it to the floor, lighting fires to get rid of the damp, or (strictly against orders) scrubbing out the bath which, later, strive as I would, I could never successfully re-enamel. Then in the evening I would hasten for the Hampstead bus, stride up from the Heath Station, and, arrived at home, throw off my coat, put up shelves, fit carpets, see how my new paint (an ivory white) was drying, and only knock off when, not Etiquette, but the lateness of the hour and the distance I had to take Evie home compelled me.
I liked the daily life at the F.B.C. Our various departments were to a great extent isolated, so that the intermediate clerks like myself could only guess at the relation of their own portion of the work to the whole intricate business; but I have told you how I myself was privately "let in on the ground floor" by Pepper. I had three "Juns. Ex. Con." as my immediate subordinates, and they were first-rate fellows, and amusing company into the bargain. All three, Whitlock, Stonor and Peddie, were younger than I by some years; and as they were all bachelors, and there was plenty of time yet for them to begin to take their work very seriously, they showed not a trace of envy of me. Indeed, being rather "doggish" in their dress, and reckoning the work of the day as little more than a killing of time until the pleasures of the evening should begin, they even made something of a pet of their "Balzac in adressing-gown"; and as if the nearness of our offices to Piccadilly put on them some responsibility that the character for gaiety of that gay part of London should not suffer through their negligence, they had an air of owning the quarter. They furnished drinks at Epitaux's as a man might in his own house, and introduced their companions at Stone's as if they had been veritable guests. True, funds did not often run to the old Continental over the way; but they knew by sight many of the loungers who entered its portals from four o'clock in the afternoon on, and would exchange intelligent glances over their filing or posting as suède boots, or picture hat, or something that looked as if it had stepped out of Stagg & Mantle's window tripped seductively by.
Pepper, of course, was my own immediate superior, as I was of my three boys; and while our private arrangement put me after office hours straightway on a level with the mandarins of the concern, we strictly kept our respective positions at Waterloo Place. I prepared drafts for him of such matters as Paying Ballast, Railway Digests, the daily postings at Lloyd's and the fluctuations of Insurance Rates; and these he changed into factors of policy in high council with the lords of other departments. His private office was immediately above ours; and twenty times a day his secretary, Miss Levey, descended the broad mosaic staircase or came down in the gilt and upholstered lift, either commanding myattendance, or bringing me instructions. It was a "wheeze" among my three boys to pose as her admirers, but I never thought she was quite so unconscious of their real thoughts as they supposed.
I was going to pass on; but while I am about it I may as well say a little more about this Miss Levey, and my reasons for regarding her as a person to be rather carefully watched. She was short, and a victim to her race's tendency to early stoutness; and as she had no neck, and always wore hats far too large for her, her appearance was top-heavy. Of her too large and prominent features her pot-hook nose was the most prominent. Her manner towards myself was that of one who would have liked to be familiar, but lacked the confidence; and doubtless her perpetual hovering on the confines of a liberty arose out of some slight acquaintance she had had with Evie in the days of her business training. As if Evie's health was as liable to fluctuations as the Export charts and Trade returns on our walls, Miss Levey never omitted to inquire after it each morning, becoming daily moreempresséeas our engagement proceeded; but so far she had not succeeded in what I divined to be her object, an invitation to renew the old acquaintance. And though I could keep the greater part of our intercourse strictly to business, I could hardly avoid occasional meetings on the stairs, in the lift, or sometimes a walk up Lower Regent Street with her as far as the Circus.
It was during the course of one of these short walks, one lunch-time, that, having obtained from me her daily bulletin, Miss Levey rather put me in a hole by asking me what I thought Evie would like for a wedding present. Secretly I neither wanted a wedding present from Miss Levey nor wished Evie to receive one, but I could hardly give her the slap on the face of telling her so. Instead I answered, a little abruptly, that I really didn't know—that it was awfully kind of her—and that she wasn't to think of it; but she did not take the hint. So, knowing her capacity for swallowing, but not forgetting snubs, and really feeling that perhaps I had gone a little too far, I hastened to repair a possible rudeness. We were approaching the tea-shop near the Circus at which I usually lunched; we reached it, and paused together on the kerb; and then, on the spur of the moment, I suggested that she should lunch with me. With a little demonstration of pleasure she accepted, and we entered and took our places at a small round table in the shadow of the pay-desk.
I knew, of course, that I had been cornered, and that she knew it too; but in these cases the thick-skinned person always has the advantage. I resolved that that advantage should be as slight as possible. And for a time—though probably not for one moment longer than she wished—I succeeded. As she ate her rissole and sipped her chocolate she talked with animation of this and that—the morning'sbusiness, the people in the crowded shop, the theatres, and so on; and then she returned to the subject of the wedding present, the date of my marriage, where we were going to live, and the rest of it. I was as reserved as my unwillingly given invitation allowed me to be, but presently I had to promise to ask Evie what form she would like the present to take. With that, Miss Levey went off at score, speaking of Evie as she had known her.
"I suppose she's prettier than ever?" she said. "Such a lovely girl I used to think her! I'm sure you're very lucky, Mr Jeffries, if you don't mind my saying so!"
I did rather mind her saying anything about it at all, but I answered quite conventionally that I considered myself very lucky indeed.
"Those were jolly days!" she passed on into reminiscence. "I loved that poky little old place in Holborn!... Do you remember the Secretary Bird, Mr Jeffries?"
I did remember Weston, the wan, middle-aged "professor."
"Poor old soul! I wonder if he's going with them to the new place? Of course you know they're pulling the old one down?"
"Yes."
"Such a huge one, that one in Kingsway! All the latest improvements—everything! But it won't ever be the same to me.... 'Not room to turnround'?... No, I suppose there wasn't, but I suppose I'm rather faithful to old places and old faces. You aren't, Mr Jeffries?"
"Not just because they're old," I fancied.
"Oh, I think I am, just because they're old!" she replied brightly.
From faces and places she passed to names, though—this was quite marked—only to certain ones; and I became rather obstinately silent except when she actually paused for a remark. For far more significant were the names she omitted than those she pronounced. These, indeed, she positively had the effect of shouting at me, and I suppose it was some heavy-handed delicacy that led her to speak of Weston but not of Archie Merridew, of Evie, but not of Kitty Windus and others she had known far better. I supposed her to be merely gratifying her racial greed for general (including personal) information, on the chance, so to speak, of turning up in the dustheap something she might later sell for twopence; and, noting one of her marked omissions, it occurred to me to wonder whether she might not have seen Kitty Windus, and, failing to get anything out of her, was now pumping myself and looking for an opening to pump Evie also. My eyes rested from time to time on her prominent-featured face and wide, high shoulders; and she did not know that I was wondering whether she was so deeply in Pepper's secrets that we should not be able to dispensewith her services when he and I cleared out of the F.B.C. together.
I maintained my silence while she went on with herHamletwithout the Prince, that is to say, while she talked of the now demolished Business College without mentioning Archie Merridew, Kitty Windus, Louie Causton and the rest; and then, pleading an engagement, I rose. She rose too. With her purse in her hand, she made quite an ado about refusing to allow me to pay for the lunch to which I had invited her. "Please—or I shall feel as if we can't lunch together again!" she said; "let me see; sevenpence, that's right, isn't it? There! You will remember me to Evie, won't you?"
And she scrupulously put the sevenpence into one of my hands while with the other I held the door open for her to pass out.
I did not give Evie Miss Levey's message that evening, for when, at a little after seven, I reached the Vale of Health, I found Miss Angela there. The elder Miss Soames, I ought to say, regarded our wedding as so exclusively Evie's (myself sometimes appearing to have no part whatever in it) that I was constantly invited to share her own detached delight. Giving up Evie's bedroom only, she intended to stay on at Woburn Place; but from the number of offerings she brought us her own sitting-room was like to be sadly denuded. She brought, and if possible hid in a corner for us to discover after she had left,heavy old silver tablespoons, her shield-shaped embroidered fire-screen, her Colport dressing-table set with the little coral-like trees for rings, and other gifts; and it was in vain that Evie laughingly protested.
"But if you go on like this we shall have to have you come and live with us!" she said. "Make you up a bed on the verandah—but perhaps that's what she's really after, Jeff——"
But Miss Angela shook her head demurely, ignoring the joke. "No, no—young people ought to be alone; they don't want old things like me interfering. I shall be just as happy thinking of you both as if it was my own wedding."
And I really believe she was.
For the Etiquette of our preparations, Aunt Angela threw herself pathetically on my mercy.
Her sitting-room in Woburn Place, however, was not the only one that was rapidly becoming denuded. My own place with the terra-cotta festoons and hobgoblins was now more than half empty. But I was not relinquishing it yet. I knew I was committing a sentimental extravagance in thus being lord of two domiciles, but (Etiquette having to be considered) I did not wish to go into the new place until I should go there with Evie. So already two cartloads of my belongings had been fetched away, and that very day Miss Angela had been assisting in a task that more than any other seemed the beginning of theend—the removal of my carpet. They did not tell me of this removal. They allowed me to discover it for myself when I went, without light, upstairs into the drawing-room. They had already laid it down; my foot struck its softness in the dark; and I experienced a sudden little thrill of pleasure. It seemed to bring all so suddenly near....
They had crept up after me with a lamp to enjoy my surprise. The room really looked delightful, and all my sense of drawbacks vanished. Four glass candle-sconces with musical little drops—I had picked them up cheap in the street that runs from the Britannia to Regent's Park—were fastened to the walls, two between the window-bays over my breast-high mahogany bookshelves, the other two at the sides of the fireplace in the opposite wall; and across the windows themselves the long chintz curtains were drawn. Evie set the lamp down on the little table that folded almost to nothing against the wall, and tripped round with a taper, lighting up. All my chairs were there, and the couch for which I had ransacked half the catacombs of the Tottenham Court Road, and I can't tell you how pretty it all was, with its ivory woodwork, its dark blue and crimson blotted carpet, and the candle flames turning the polished glass lustres to soft sprinklings of gems. Miss Angela, delicate Pandar, seeing Evie's hand steal towards mine, affected to be very busy at the mantelpiece....
"So," I grumbled presently, "this is your idea of the cheapest way of lighting a room—candles at goodness knows how much a pound?"
"Well, there's no electric light," retorted Evie.
"And what have you left me at the other place? A bed and a broken chair, I suppose, to make shift with for three weeks and more!"
"Anda jampot for your shaving-water. Quite enough for a bachelor."
"And I'm to get my meals out, I suppose, and pay twice as much for them."
But they only begged me to look where they had put Billy Izzard's two sketches—one on either side of the verandah door.
I had, in truth, begun to feel the least bit alarmed at the rate at which the money was going. Kitchens, I learned, cost like the dickens; but, as Evie frugally extinguished the candles again and led me down into her special province, I could not deny that that looked pretty too, with its bright tins, hanging jugs, overlapping rows of plates and saucers and the new linoleum of its floor. The dining-room, into which (as Evie said) "all the dirt was brought," had been left until the last, and was knee-deep in straw, torn packing-paper, split box-lids and cut string, and of course I grumbled again that good brown paper had been torn and useful string spoiled, until I was brought into good temper again by being allowed another peep at the lighted drawing-room—this time without Aunt Angela.
We were to be married at half-past ten on the following Saturday morning but one, at St. George's, Hart Street, Bloomsbury. We had chosen a Saturday because of our honeymoon, which was to be a steamboat trip either down the river to Greenwich or up the river to Hampton Court—we had not decided which. A good friend of mine, Sydney Pettinger, who had given me my start with F.B.C., had promised to give Evie away. Pepper would have done so, but Pepper always dazzled Evie a little. He was almost inhumanly never at a loss for a word.
Our little house was now quite ready. They had left me not so much as a chair in my room near the Cobden Statue. My pallet bed and my shaving-tackle were about all that remained within its walls, and I was on the point of disposing of the bed as it stood to a dealer in Queen's Crescent, when Billy Izzard proposed to me that he should take over the place.
Let me describe Billy Izzard as he was then—as he still to a great extent is for the matter of that, for his innumerable quarrels with dealers and intransigence on hanging committees have resulted in his being less well known than the high quality of his painting warrants. He was a tall, double-jointed,monkey-up-a-stick of a lad of twenty-four, with well-shaped features that always seemed a little larger than the ordinary (as if you saw them through a very weak lens), and two or three distinct voices, the most startling of which was the sudden, imperious tone into which he broke when he "saw" something—saw it absolute, in the flat, and as if it had never been seen before—but possibly you know his painting. He had exquisite manners, which he never used; he dressed in tweeds that made my own shaggy garments look like the finest broadcloth—they always seemed stuck over with fishing-flies; and, a sufficiently large studio being beyond his means until he should cease to quarrel with his bread and butter, he too had discovered the advantages of the large rooms that are to be found over shops.
He came up with his wedding present, yet another painting, just as I was contemplating the sale of my bed. The picture, wrapped in newspaper, was under his arm. He scratched his head under his porringer of a "sports" cap, looked round the big four-windowed room, and said, "Good light—south and east though—what?"
"South and east," I replied; and added, knowing Billy, "Rent paid monthly, in advance."
"How much?" he demanded.
"Twelve bob a week."
"Hm! Rather a lot for me," said the man whose practice (for his theory never amounted to much)has since been made the foundation of a whole school of modern painting. "Wish I hadn't brought you this now—I was offered three pounds for it—that would have paid for the first month——"
I hastened to grab the painting, to make sure of getting it. It was only a small flower group, a straggle of violets, a few white ones among them, in a lustre bowl, but the other day I refused sixty pounds for it.
"Too late, Billy," I said; "you know you can't fight me for it.... I'll throw you in my bed if you want the place, but you're not to give my name as a reference for your solvency."
"I think it might do," he said. "I could shut off some of the light, and I don't suppose they'd mind my making it an un-Drapery Establishment sometimes."
Billy was just beginning to paint flesh as truly and seeingly as he painted flowers.
With the exception of Aunt Angela's constant trickle, Billy's was our first wedding-present; but others followed quickly. Pepper, of course, contrived to get his joke out of his own very handsome offering. One day, at the end of one of our morning interviews in his office, he said: "Oh, by the way—I sent a small parcel off to you yesterday. I suppose 'Jeffries, Verandah Cottage, Vale of Health' finds you?"
"Yes."
"It brings all good wishes, of course. Being a bachelor I've had to rely on my own unaided taste. If the things don't seem very useful just at present, they will be."
In spite of his twinkle, I did not fear that his present would not be in the best of taste, and I thanked him for it, whatever it was. Then, when I returned to my own office, I found another surprise. A square, shop-packed, registered parcel lay on my desk. This, when I opened it, I found to contain a large silver cigarette-box with my name upon it, the offering of my three "Juns. Ex. Con." It was full of cigarettes of a far finer quality than any for which I had yet acquired the taste; and though only the mandarins of the F.B.C. were supposed to smoke on the premises, "Whitlock—Peddie——," I said, "have a cigarette?"
All of them appeared to come with a start out of a quite unusual absorption in their work.
"This is very good of you fellows," I said awkwardly.
So we lighted up, the four of us, and with the coming of lunch-time I had to stand whiskies and soda at Stone's. I learned later that on my wedding evening all three of them got quite disinterestedly drunk in honour of the occasion.
I found on reaching home that evening that Pepper's "small parcel" was really two, the larger one about the size of an ordinary bureau, the smaller oneperhaps no bigger than a tea-chest. As both were addressed to me, neither had been opened; but I really feared that this severe continence had done both Evie and her aunt an injury—so much so that I mercifully cut short my affectation of not noticing the huge packages.
"If he's not going to sit down without opening them!" cried Evie, revolted. "And a hammer and chisel put ready to his hand——!"
"Oh, these things," I said. "They're from Pepper, I suppose. Do you want them opened at once?"
"Do we want——! Open them instantly!"
"Well, I can't in here——"
I carried the boxes out into our tiny verandah-roofed yard, and there prised the lids off. Then I fell back before the onslaught they made on the straw with which the cases were filled. The smaller one contained a silver-mounted champagne-cooler; the larger one two enormous branched silver candlesticks, big enough to have furnished the table that stood before the Ark of the Covenant. So splendid were they that Evie, seeing them, did not dare to touch them; and I remember how Pepper had said that they would be useful by-and-by—which, I may say, they were.
"Hm!" I said. "Well, we'd better pawn 'em at once. We've certainly nowhere to put them."
And indeed, the objects, the cases they came in, and ourselves, almost cubically filled the little yard.Besides taking the shine completely out of the rest of the house, they cost me getting on towards a pound of candles that night, for of course we had to have another grand illumination in their honour; but Pepper only laughed when I told him.
"I'm setting you a scale of living, my boy," he said. "If you spend a lot you've got to make a lot—that's all about it."
"Well, I'll be even with you," I replied, "for your champagne-cooler's going to be my waste-paper basket."
And so it was, for long enough.
In this "setting me a scale of living" Pepper was aided and abetted by Pettinger, for if the candlesticks of the one meant the extravagance of candles, so did the two great china bowls of the other a constant expenditure of money on flowers. The only immediate profit I had of any of these magnificences was a plentiful supply of firewood. The cases they all came in, when knocked to pieces, made quite a respectable stack of timber.
There were only a couple more wedding presents that I need particularise. The first of these puzzled us for a long time. It came by letter post, a small, soft parcel addressed to Evie, containing a crochet-bordered teacloth; and except for an "L." written on a blank card, there was no indication of who the sender might be. Then I remembered Miss Levey.
"Of course—how stupid not to think of it!" said Evie. "I'll write her a note at once, and you can give it to her to-morrow."
"Oh—we'll spend a penny on it," I said.
But that very evening, before the note was posted, Miss Levey's present came, a pair of chimney ornaments—bronzed Arabs taming mettlesome steeds—brought by a young man who might have been either a cousin or a pawnbroker's assistant.
And as an explicit note accompanied the Arabs, the crochet teacloth remained unaccounted for.
And so the days slipped by. I was now unfit for anything until I should be married, and Evie was as restless as myself. A great shyness now began to come over her at times, leaving her, perhaps in the middle of a conversation, with never a word to say; and I understood, and secretly exulted. She bloomed indeed at those moments....
Let me, without losing any more time, come to the eve of my wedding and the last night I spent in my bachelor rooms.
I paced for long up and down my empty room that night. I had put on a pair of soft slippers, for the room was immediately above a dormitory where a number of shop-girls who "lived in" slept; and the light of my single candle was reflected in one or other of the squares of my naked windows as I walked. Then I threw up one of the sashes, andlooked out among my terra-cotta Satans and festoons.
It was a marbled night of velvet black and iron grey, the two hues so mysteriously counterchanged that you could have fancied either to be the cloud and the other the abyss beyond until a star peeped out to tell you of your mistake. It was very still, and must have been very late, for down the road a mechanical sweeper was dragging along with a hiss of bristles. I watched it, but not out of sight, for before it had disappeared my eyes had wandered from it and were not looking at anything in particular.
I was thinking of Life—not only of that stormy share of it that up to the present had been my own, but also of that other portion of it that lay, unknown and unknowable until it should arrive, still before me. And so all my thoughts turned on the morrow as on a pivot. In nine hours or less I should be a married man, and a new time would have begun for me.
It was on the nearness of that new beginning that I brooded restlessly and passionately. For just as my Ambition had set itself the aim of that large house over Highgate way, so my Love also was going to be a thing of brightness and terraces and spires—nothing meaner, such as men shake down to out of their failure and disillusion. Ah, if care could compass it, mine was going to be a marriage! I believed that, and looking out over the Cobden Statue, Iappointed that moment of our union for an expunging of all—all, all—that had gone before.
For what man old enough to have heaped up his sins does not, out of that very ache for a new beginning, seek to bespeak one of heaven by appointing a time and a season for it? Not one. Poor pathetic things of the fancy though his decrees may be, he cannot live without their expediencies. In his mind at least he sets an hour for his release.
And on that night of all nights I could not but remember all. Sins I had committed; and though some might have called that a sin which I should have proclaimed in the face of heaven to have been a righteous act, that also I remembered.... It seemed, that night, to matter little that I was acquitted of one guilt when I had incurred a wrath by other guilts innumerable; it was from the whole body of an ancient death that I fainted to be delivered. My worldly ambition I knew to be not an empty boast; oh, might but this other rebirth of mine prove to be equally well founded! A rebirth—a white page for Evie and myself to write the story of our love upon—and even that spectre of her own life, of the dreadful coming of which this was in a sense the anniversary, would not have been an agony endured for nothing! Not all in vain would have been the grim discovery of that which, four years before, had hung from a hook in a bedroom door!Not all lost, not all lost, might but the morrow prove my second natal day!
So, passionate and unresting, I prayed among my swags and emblems and gargoyles. The street-sweeper had long since gone; soon would come a lamplighter extinguishing the street lamps; now all was quiet. I dropped my head on my arms for a moment....
Then, looking up at the marbled clouds behind which the stars seemed to drift, I muttered, to Whomsoever might be up there to hear:
"Oh, let it all but sink and die away—let it all but sink and die away—and my life shall be—it shall be——"
I do not know whether my lips framed the promise of what my life should be, could I but strike my bargain.
In speaking of the early days of my married life I must throw myself largely on your consideration. I have not guarded through the years that sharp impatience that I presently came to feel with that tiny house in the Vale of Health. Lately I have thought more kindly of it, as if at some stage of my journey through Life (though I cannot tell when) I had heard a call behind me, turned my head, and, forgetting to turn it back again, had continued to advance backwards, recognising things in proportion as they receded. I live now in a mansion in Iddesleigh Gate; that ambition of mine, my spur in the past, is becoming a mere desire that when I go my successor shall find all in working order to his hand; and so the shabby brown earth I once trod has taken the lightsome blue of distance, and many things are seen through a sheen that, perhaps, never was there. Therefore if you would see that sheen it must be by your own favour and through whatever of glamour time and distance have given to your own young years.
For, when all allowances are made, I still think that that relation which is more than friendship was ours. Male and female (the New Mannotwithstanding) we were created, and to a lower conception than that I have never in all my life declined. I have seen that declension in others, and know how it sinks ultimately to the mere comfortable security of a banking account. Whatever else I have known I have escaped that. By what wide circuit of the spirit I know not, I have returned to find the divine where others have not stirred from grossness. And I have even had glimpses of that shadowy apocalypse that finds its images, not in thrones and sceptres, but in the flesh-hooks and seething-pots of the kitchen.... But to Verandah Cottage and the Vale of Health.
I was happy with Evie, she with me. From my daily leaving her at nine o'clock in the morning until my return at half-past seven at night, she had almost, if not quite, enough to occupy her; and though I could have wished she had more friends, so that when she had finished her work the summer afternoons might not have appeared quite so long, yet I exercised a care that almost amounted to a jealousy in this regard. Understand me, however. It was against no person that I protected her with this jealous care. It was always with pleasure that I learned that Billy Izzard had looked in and talked to her for an hour at tea, or that Aunt Angela had been up to take the air or to fetch her out for a couple of hours' shopping. I merely mean that I saw no reason for her identifying herself with a set ofcircumstances that before long would probably have changed completely. It was part of my Ambition that, until I should have attained it, we should be a little solitary. Nor was it that I thought that the people we might by-and-by be able to meet on equal terms would be any better than those we might have known at once. It was a question of the place we were ultimately to occupy. And I begged Evie, if at times she did feel a little lonely, to be patient for my sake. So for quite a long time Billy and her aunt remained her only visitors.
The house next door might have been untenanted for all we saw of its inmates, and that, I confess, made me a little angry. I did not know the niceties of the matter, nor whether the difference between a thirty-five pound rental and one of perhaps eighty pounds outweighed those confident dicta of Evie's penny journals about "cards," "calls," and the rest; nor yet did I deem it a reason for taking anybody to my bosom that only a wall separated our dwellings; but the fact that they, whoever they were, never called stiffened me. An eighty-pound house! To put on airs about a matter of eighty pounds!... But I saw the humour of it too, and laughed.
"I'm sorry if it's rather slow, little woman," I used to say, "but wait just a bit. Let's stick it out on our own for just a little while. You'd rather be with me, now, than have waited for a year or two till we were better off, wouldn't you?"
"How absurd you are!" she would reply, nestling up to me.
"Well, keep going for a bit longer, and see what happens. I'm not deliberately hanging back from Pepper's offer for nothing, I promise you.... And at any rate the Vicar will be calling."
You see, we had agreed on the imprudence of having children at once.
But the Vicar never came, which was a fair enough hit back if he meant it for one, since we only attended his church once, and after that, I am afraid, went to churches here and there, attracted by good singing, a beautiful fabric, a man with brains preaching, and other things that perhaps mitigated the quality of our worship. And very frequently we did not go to church at all, but explored the Heath instead. And often, on Saturdays and Sundays, we went still farther afield. Greenwich had been hallowed to us by our half-day's honeymoon, and as if in this Hampton Court had suffered a slight, we made amends by going to the latter place quite often. We must have gone four or five times that summer, so that we got to know the Lelys and the Holbeins and the tea-shops, and the long drag home again from Waterloo in the old horse-bus, quite well. And one week-end we spent with Pettinger, at his place at Bedford, with two cattle-show men, an actor and an International footballer, all on their best behaviour until Evie had gone to bed. Then, when I joinedher, she accused me of having had more than one glass of whisky, and wanted to know what we had been talking about all that time. I tried to tell her "the bubonic plague," but my tongue betrayed me, and I came a cropper.
So, as I had done before during our engagement, I could look up from my work during the day, past the Duke of York's Column and over the Mall, and wonder what she was doing at that moment—changing our pillow-cases, popping the pared potatoes into the saucepan of cold water, dusting, washing up, polishing, or pottering about the flower-boxes I had set on our little balcony.
Miss Levey had still not been asked to come up and see Evie, but so quietly tenacious of her purpose did I divine her to be, that I was sorry I had not invited her at once and got it over. The thing was beginning to look almost like an unacknowledged contest between us. At times I forgot my original reason for keeping her at arm's-length—her forwardness, pertinacity, and racial hunger for the rags and bones and old bottles of gossip; and that she "spelt" to be asked was in itself reason enough for ignoring her hints. I may say that by doing so I cut myself from quite a distinguished circle of acquaintances, and on this point had sometimes to check my three clerks. For never a notability called on Pepper but Miss Levey, on the strength of being called in to take down in shorthand a conversation, claimed him for aclose acquaintance. And as far as I can make out, she must actually have believed it, for she kept up the fiction even to us, who knew perfectly well all about it. Goodness knows what she told outsiders.... So with Whitlock, Stonor and Peddie it became a byword to say, when speaking of somebody exalted: "You know who I mean—that pal of Miss Levey's—Lord Ernest," or "Miss Levey's friend—what's his name—the President of the Board of Trade."
After the present of the silver cigarette-box, not to speak of the handsome compliment of their intoxication on my wedding night, I had thought it the least I could do to ask Whitlock and Stonor (Peddie lived out Croydon way, too far to come) to come up one Sunday and have tea with us. So they had been, and for two hours had displayed manners as highly starched as their collars. They had been, I fancy, a little surprised that, if I was a Balzac in a dressing-gown, my wife at any rate was no Sand in a flannelette peignoir. (For that matter, nothing was ever neater than Evie's skirts and blouses, and when by-and-by she began to make her own things there could hardly have been anything more becoming than her clear, sweet-pea-coloured muslins, that really would have been too rippling and Tanagra-like altogether had it not been for the stiffer petticoats beneath.) I surmised later that Stonor had taken, so to speak, a mental pattern of Evie, formatching purposes when he should come upon another girl like her; and Whitlock, whose pose it was that he would never marry, could on that very account admire the more openly.
The visit of the two clerks, of course, made my attitude towards Miss Levey all the more pointed; but I still preferred not to have her at the Vale of Health. And seeing this, Evie vowed that she did not want her either. The two Arab horse-tamers stood on our drawing-room mantelpiece, not because I admired them, but simply because we had nowhere else to put them; and they were all of Miss Levey that was absolutely needful to our happiness.
Yet I recognised that the lack, not of Miss Levey, but of company in general, was far harder on Evie than it was on me. I knew exactly why I didn't want overmuch company; Evie, who had the deprivation actually to bear, had to take the reason on trust. All my interests lay ahead; she knew only the tedium of the present. It was her part, if I may so express it, to keep bright those ridiculous empty candlesticks of Pepper's without my own certainty that candles were coming to fill them—to polish those rose bowls of Pettinger's without knowing where the roses were coming from. And I could hardly blame her if sometimes she seemed to be a little in doubt whether, after all, the things I prophesied so confidently were not merely fancy pictures of what I should like the future to be.
So, more to occupy her than anything else, I bought her out of my small earnings a hand sewing-machine, and paid for a lesson for her once a week at a skirt-maker's. And that made things rather easier. She could now pick not only her blouses to pieces, but her skirts also; and from a fear lest my interest in these occupations of hers might appear simulated when she showed me the results on my return at night, I actually did cast an eye on a costumier's or modiste's window now and then, relating to her, though goodness only knows in what masculine terms of my own, what I had seen. And during the day I could gaze past the Duke of York's Column with its wheeling pigeons and think of her, unpicking, pinning tissue-paper patterns, basting, threading the eye of her sewing-machine needle, or, with some garment or other tucked under her crumpled chin, trying to see the whole of herself at once in the narrow strip of mirror she had fetched from the bedroom.
Between Evie's happiness and my important affairs with Pepper, I do not know which was my major and which my minor preoccupation. If my Love and my Ambition were really one, that only meant that often I had to do half a thing at a time. Since Judy and I did not discuss our private affairs at the offices in Waterloo Place, it followed that we had to do so after the day's work was over; and, having been away from home all day, this sometimescaused me to absent myself for the greater part of the evening also. At first, unwilling to do this, I had brought Pepper home with me; but as he always seemed altogether too bright a jewel for our little cottage, and as Evie, moreover, besides getting flurried about what she was to give him to eat, always drew in her horns in his presence, reproaching herself afterwards that she had seemed stupid to my friend, that had not so far proved a great success. The only alternative was, that I should dine with him, getting away afterwards as soon as I could. I did not like this, but it was unavoidable.
From my observation of some at least of the hotels Pepper took me to, I judged that he had some sort of a running account, balanced afterwards, whether in cash or consideration, I knew not how; for often enough, barring the tip to the waiter, no money seemed to change hands. At other times and other places he paid what seemed to me extravagant sums. Sometimes he was in evening dress, sometimes not; I, of course, never was; and so, places where the plastron wasde rigueurbeing closed to us, I did not at first see Judy in the full blaze of his splendour. On the whole, we dined most frequently at Simpson's, where morning dress is not conspicuous; and it was one night at Simpson's that Judy mentioned this very matter to me.
"By the way," he said suddenly, over his coffee,as if he had been on the point of forgetting something, "better keep a week next Wednesday free. I want you to meet Robson."
I was conscious of a sudden slight constriction somewhere inside me. Robson was not royalty, but as far as I was concerned he might almost as well have been.
"The Berkeley, at eight," Judy continued. "You'll dress, of course!"
I wondered what in. His champagne-cooler and candlesticks, perhaps....
"You needn't be afraid of Robson," Pepper continued, perhaps noticing my dismay. "As a matter of fact, he's rather afraid of me, soyouought to be able to pulverize him."
I saw that I must take my stand at once.
"You can bring Robson to Verandah Cottage if you like," I said shortly, "but I'm not going to the Berkeley."
"Rubbish," Pepper remarked lightly. "The table's booked. Robson's coming down from Scotland specially, and Campbell will be there too, and George Hastie. Hastie's put off a visit to Norway on purpose. You've got to tell 'em what you told me that Sunday at the Bull and Bush."
"Then if they want to hear that, they'll have to have it from you."
Pepper showed not a trace of impatience. "My dear chap, don't I just wish Icouldput it as youdid!" he flattered me.... "No, no; I've told them all about you, and it's you, not me, they're coming to see.... What's the difficulty?" he asked, with a little scintillation of amusement.
"The difficulty is that if you'd told me this a week ago, I should have stopped it."
"So I thought," he replied dryly.... "Do you know West's, in Bond Street?"
"No."
"Well, you'd better go there to-morrow." Then he patted my arm. "Can't be helped, Jeff. The plunge has to be taken. You won't find 'em snobs. It's the waiters you dress for—I expect that's why you dress like 'em. Good Lord, these chaps have got far too much on their minds to bother aboutthat!... Go to West's and take my card; I'll 'phone 'em. I gave way to you before; if you don't give way to me now, you'll wreck us. I'd have had it at Alfred Place if I could, but I don't want Hastie and Robson there. So you go to West's to-morrow, and remember, a week on Wednesday, at eight."
I did go to West's on the morrow, and my brow grows moist yet when I think of it. It appeared that before West's could dress me they had to undress me, and my wild and half-formed thoughts that I might pass as a bushranger or miner or wealthy and eccentric antipodean vanished. Miners' flannel shirts are not patched as neatly as Evie had patched mine; bushrangers do not wear loose cuffs withgold-washed links at eighteenpence a pair; and the respectful "Sirs" to which my two acolytes treated me made my hands itch dangerously to knock their heads together.... So they ran their fingers over my burning body; and because Pepper had let me in for this, I partly, but only partly, got back at him by ordering an admirable lounge suit also, which, for all I know, he owes for to this day. Then I left that place of torture, almost prepared to think twice of my Ambition if it was going to involve very much of this kind of thing.
Evie had received the news of my approaching introduction to exalted personages with a certain wistfulness, which she had tried to cover with an extreme brightness of manner. Of course my position was altogether anomalous; that "scale of living" of Pepper's, coming far too early for my circumstances, was a white elephant; but I don't think it was that that made Evie at the same time brightly fussy and secretly shrinking. Rather, I imagine, it was that for the first time she began to fear my Ambition a little. I don't mean that hitherto she had been hoping that my great plans were baseless imaginings, but I do mean that she was settled and happy as she was, and that a Verandah Cottage twice as big would have contented her to the end of her days. When I brought that really splendid dress suit home (for I had had it sent to the F.B.C., not wishing those ducal tailors to know the poverty ofmy address), I think her mind suddenly enlarged to strange disturbing vistas, and she examined the stitching of the garments thoughtfully.
"They're beautifully made," she said softly. "I never saw anything finished like that. But I wish Mr Pepper had not had to pay for them."
"Pepper pay?" I laughed. "Pepper'll pay when the cows come home. It isn't that that's troubling me."
"What then?" she asked.
"I want to see you dressed like that too.... But don't you want to see me with them on?"
"Yes," she said, but as it were obediently, because I had suggested it.
I went upstairs and got into those costly garments. I had ordered shirts, and ties too, and, not being in the habit of wearing undergarments, I had to consider what to do with the small tab beneath the plastron that should have anchored me forrard. With my penknife I finally performed the operation for appendicitis upon it. Then, looking bigger even than usual, I descended, black, white and majestical.
"Your tie won't do," said Evie. "Come here."
But suddenly, as she was refashioning my bow, she flung her arms about my neck and burst into tears on my breast. Then, when I asked her gently what was the matter, she only withdrew herself,wiped her eyes, and said that she was silly. Queer creatures. It was only the newness and unfamiliarity of the prospect. It was as if she was quite happy in her poverty, merely thinking of riches....
I myself had the trifling care on my mind of who was going to sit with Evie while I lorded it at the Berkeley. Ordinarily I should have counted on her aunt, but Miss Angela had announced that she must go to Guildford that day on some business or other connected with the late Mrs Merridew's will. There was, of course, Miss Levey, but I still considered Verandah Cottage too humble for the friend of Lord Ernest and the confidante of the President of the Board of Trade. Evie protested that she would be quite all right alone, but that I would not hear of.
"I'll tell you what," I said. "Give Billy Izzard dinner that evening. I'll go round and ask him to sit with you. That'll be the best thing."
"I should be quite, quite all right, dear," she said again.
"No," I replied, "I'll get Billy. I'll write a note to him now. Then I'll show you the other suit."
The other suit did not flutter her quite so much. It was just as exquisite in its way, an iron-grey hopsack, with trousers for which I had had to peel three times, but it did not speak quite so plainly of functions and high assemblages. I really did not know where I was going to keep these two suits, asI had no trousers press, and our wardrobe accommodation was exceedingly limited; and I discovered, on arriving home early on the evening of the Berkeley dinner, that I had no summer overcoat fit for mygrande tenue. As the choice lay between taking a cab the whole of the way and wearing my heavy winter ulster, I chose the latter alternative; and Evie tied my bow and turned up the bottoms of those trousers that pre-supposed broughams and wicker wheel-guards and alightings on red druggets under awnings built out over pavements.
"Billy'll be here in an hour," I said. "I'll look in on him as I pass. You'll be quite all right till then, and I'll be back as soon as I can. Good-bye, darling."
She stood in skirt and delaine blouse at the ivy-green, glass-panelled door, and waved her hand as I turned the corner. I sought the bus terminus in the High Street, treading carefully, for it had been raining, and there were puddles to avoid. The bus started. Twenty minutes later I got down opposite my old place with the gargoyles and terra-cotta ornaments. I mounted the stairs and tapped at Billy's door, entering as I tapped.
"Time you were starting for Verandah Cottage, Billy," I said....
The next moment I was staring open-mouthed at what was before me.
"All right, Louie—thanks," said Billy Izzard. "Right-o, Jeffries—I didn't think it was so late——"
But the model on the throne did not get down.
I had parted my ulster in coming up the stairs, and my dress beneath showed. The contrast struck me as brutal. For one moment I was conscious of it; I don't think that she was, even for one moment. I don't think she saw anything of me but my eyes. I did not of her.
Billy had turned his back on his work, but still she did not move. More even than my own ceremonial dress the bit of crochet woolwork that lay on the edge of the throne seemed to accentuate the drama that was all sight, with never a word spoken. As if my eyes had moved from hers, which they did not, I seemed to see the whole of that room that had been my own—the imps beyond the sills, Billy's traps, his arrangements of curtains about the four windows, the bed behind the screen where I divined her clothing to lie. I say I saw all these things without once looking at them....
The exquisite study was on the easel, and I saw that too—the thing as it was, east-lighted,admirably cool, the work of an unrepeatable two hours. Billy, I knew, would look on that canvas on the morrow as an athlete afterwards measures with astonishment his effortless jump. It was the eye's flawless understanding....
"It isn't a picture," Billy grunted over his shoulder, his fingers rattling the tubes in his box. "Where the deuce did I put that palette-knife?—Just a study—I had it in my hand not two minutes ago——"
Still she and I stood as motionless as a couple of stones.
"Dashed if I won't be methodical yet! I never—ah, here it is.... Right, Louie; I've finished. Chuck my coat over the screen, will you? Sorry, Jeff—I'd forgotten the time—but I must wash these brushes."
My eyes parted from Louie Causton's as reluctantly as a piece of soft iron parts from the end of the magnet. She moved, became alive, stepped down from the throne; and as she passed without noise to the screen I saw again, by what legerdemain of visual memory I cannot tell you, the soft flow of draperies that had always drawn my eyes as she had moved about the old Business College in Holborn.
Not until she had disappeared did I myself move from the spot I had occupied since I had taken my first two strides into the room.
"Just turn that thing with its face to the wall; Idon't want to see it till morning," said Billy, bustling about. "Sha'n't be a minute——"
He dashed out with a cake of soap and a handful of brushes. The tap was on the landing below. From behind the screen came soft sounds as Miss Causton dressed....
I have wasted paper in trying to set down what my thoughts and sensations were. Not to waste any more, I will tell you instead what I did. It was some minutes later, and already the running of the tap at which Billy was washing his brushes below had ceased. Time pressed. Without quite knowing how I got there, I was standing by the screen. I spoke in a low and very hurried voice.
"Miss Causton——"
The moving of clothes stopped.
"I can't see you now—I'm late already," I said.
Miss Causton's voice had formerly been drawlingly slow, but it came back quickly enough now, and altogether without surprise.
"Yes, yes—I want to see you too—quick—how late shall you be?"
"I don't know—eleven—I can't ask you to wait——"
"I'll wait—I'll have my dinner here——"
"Where, then?"
"Where are you going?"
"Piccadilly way——"
Then, breathlessly, "Swan & Edgar's, at eleven——"
"No, no——"
"Sssh—there's no time to talk—there, at eleven——"
"Half-past ten——"
"Yes——"
Billy came in again, but I was away from the screen by then. "Better hurry, unless you want a cold dinner," I said, moving towards the door; and "Better hurry yourself," I heard him say as I left....
I dashed across the road for a bus that was just starting; but it was not for some minutes after I had settled myself inside it that I began to realise what I had just done.
Then as bit by bit I grew calmer, it struck me as in the last degree remarkable. What had so suddenly impelled me to say, "I can't see you now?" And why had she replied that she too wished to see me? Why should I have wished to see her at all? Or she me? And why that long, long stare of eyes into eyes?
Robson, the Berkeley, my painfully marshalled statement, Pepper and Hastie and Campbell and all—these things had gone as completely out of my mind as if they had had no bearing at all on my life and fortunes.
I had squeezed into a corner of the bus farthest from the door, and the vehicle had glass panels forward. These were blurred with a fresh shower, orange squares, with now the halo of a lamp moving slowly past, now a muffled or umbrella-ed figure. We pulled up for a moment before the pear-shaped globes of a chemist's window, ruby and emerald, and then went forward again, and I seemed once more to hear that breathless "Swan & Edgar's—eleven," and my own "No, no!"...
I had not wanted that. I had not wanted to keep her atthatcorner, draggle-skirted, searching faces for the face she wanted, looked at in her turn, perhaps moved along by the police. For whatever I had thought before, if I had thought anything, that long union of our eyes had held no meanings of commonness....
But why the appointment at all?
"Well," I thought within myself as the bus drew up for a moment at the Adam and Eve, and then started forward again down Tottenham Court Road, "at least this explains the 'L' on the teacloth."...
After a lapse of time of which I was hardly conscious, I became aware of the glow of the Palace and the lights of Shaftesbury Avenue. By sheer force of will I dragged myself back to the present. Inexplicable as it all was, it must wait. My other business could not wait. Now for the Berkeley....
Perhaps the strange incident helped me rather than otherwise in a thing I had had quite heavily on my mind. This was the stepping out of the hansom I had picked up in the Circus and my entry into the hotel. Concerned with so much else, I had now no unconcern to rehearse. I threw my hat and coat into a pair of hands that for all I knew might not have been attached to any human body, and grunted out Pepper's name as if I had been a preoccupied monarch. I was one of twenty others who lounged or waited in the softly lighted hall, but I think the only conspicuous thing about me was my size.... Then I was aware of Pepper himself, beckoning to me across intervening heads and shoulders.
"Here he is—late as usual," he said, as if a nightly unpunctuality at such places as the Berkeley was a weakness without which I should have been an excellent fellow.
To my abstracted apology I added that not only was I late, but must leave fairly early also.
"Not unless it's for a woman," Pepper laughed. "We'll let him go then, eh, Robson? This is Jeffries—Sir Peregrine Campbell—Mr Robson. Well, let's go up.Seniores priores, Campbell."
We sought the private room Pepper had engaged.
Even had the deep disturbance of my meeting Louie Causton face to face (if I may call it that) not banished things of less consequence, I still do not think that, socially speaking, I should have letPepper down too badly. It was less formidable than I had feared. Robson, whom I need not describe, since you know his face from his countless photographs, had evidently, from the look of his shoulders, brushed his hair after putting his coat on; and Sir Peregrine Campbell made his vast silver beard a reason for not wearing a tie beneath it. A watch-chain or a ring apart, Hastie's and Pepper's clothes were no better than those I wore. The table was round. I was put between Pepper and Robson, and Pepper's command to a waiter, "Just take that thing away, will you?"—the thing being a centrepiece of flowers—enabled me to see Hastie and Campbell on the other side.
Pepper's tact on my behalf that night was matchless. Especially during the early part of the meal, when Robson was talking about Scotch moors, Hastie of tarpon-fishing in Florida, and Sir Peregrine (in a Scotch accent harsh as a macadam plough) of places half over the globe, he protected me (who had seen the sea only at Brighton and Southend) with such unscrupulousness and mendacity and charm that I really believe I passed as one who could have given them tale for tale had I chosen; and I gathered that he had carefully concealed my connection with the F.B.C.... "Has Jeffries shot bear?" he interrupted Hastie once, intercepting a direct question. "Look at him—he doesn't shoot 'em—hewrestles'em—Siberian fashion, with a knife and a dog!...I beg pardon, Robson, I interrupted you——" And so on. He told me afterwards that my hugeness and my taciturnity had created exactly the impression he had wished. You would have rubbed your eyes had you been told, seeing me in those evening clothes, that less than four years before I had worn a commissionaire's uniform in Fleet Street and touched my cap to the proprietors of Pettinger's paper.
But until our real business should begin I took leave to drop out of the conversation more and more. That low, urgent whispering over Billy Izzard's screen ran in my head again, with the thought that I had made an inconvenient and apparently purposeless appointment for half-past ten.Whyhad that quick exchange of whispers been as it were torn out of us, andwhathad she to say to me, I to her?
Again I remembered her and her story. I remembered her cynical concealment of depth under the ruffled shallows of lazy speech, the dust it had pleased her to throw into eyes by her affectations of perverseness or indifference, her munching of sweets, her exquisite hands, her violin-like foot, her soaps and pettings of a person that even then I had divined to be ill-matched with her not strikingly pretty face. I remembered the vivid contrast between her and Kitty Windus—Kitty's ridiculous fears of non-existent dangers from men in omnibuses or under gas-lamps, and Louie Causton's nonchalant, "Men, mydear? So long since I've spoken to one I really forget what they're like!" And I remembered the event that had unstrung poor Kitty and shocked Evie once for all out of her unthinking girlhood—the news that, however it had come about, Miss Causton had one day given birth to a son. That son must be between four and five years old now....
Yet it was hardly likely she had wished to speak to me about her little boy....
And why had she sent Evie that piece of crochet as a wedding present? That too became the odder the more I thought of it. Had the teacloth been, not primarily a present to Evie, but a message to myself? The teacloth—that long, long stare—that breathless conversation over the screen—were these, all of them, calls of some sort to me?
Yet to appoint Swan & Edgar's, at half-past ten! I disliked that intensely. Not every lonely woman who has taken to herself a lover would willingly court what, were I but five minutes late, she would have to endure at that rendezvous. And the more I thought of it the more convinced I was that, not anything base, but austerity, command and a glassy clearness had lain in that long regard I had met on pushing at Billy's studio door and seeing her standing there....
Then it crossed my mind that Evie was probably thinking of me that moment and wondering how I was getting along in my high company....
I could not have told you that night what the Berkeley dinners were like. I ate and spoke mechanically, and plates were taken away from me of which I had barely tasted, yet of which I had had enough. Then there came an interval without plate, or rather with a plate, doyley and finger-bowl all stacked together, and I heard Pepper say: "Let's have coffee now and then see we aren't disturbed.... Well, what about business?"
Five minutes later we were deep in the matters that were the reason of my being there.
These again Judy handled exquisitely, making of my own statement especially the most skilful of examinations-in-chief. Ostensibly laying down lines of policy himself, he contrived that these should be a drawing of me out; and it was only afterwards that I recognised how frequently he set up a falsity for me, coming heavily in, to demolish. Though ordinarily I can concentrate my thoughts when necessary for a day and a night together, I have no power of sustained speech; and so Pepper "fed" me with opportunities for destruction or approbation or comment. No large occurrence in any part of the world is immaterial to our business; as we have to look forward, reasonably probable occurrences and developments are more important still; and so our talk ranged from current events, such as Hunter's recent loss, Rundle's operations, or Loubet's plans for arapprochementof the municipalities, to the comingAmerican elections, the state of the labour world, and the health of the Queen. To the test of these general conditions, particular proposals were submitted; and though I had long known Pepper's private "hand," the skill with which he now played it was a revelation to me. At one and the same time he was laying the foundations of a dividend-paying business and of an administrative programme of which he and I were to be an indispensable part; and so, knowing more of some things than Robson, and more of others than Campbell, he set them one at another, coming in himself from time to time with an idea born of themselves five minutes before, but given back so cut and polished that it had the appearance of a new thing. I prudently said little save on an overwhelming certitude, but I think I encompassed it all and made my presence felt, now sweepingly, now as a mere deflection. I was now oblivious of all, save our conference. I seem to remember that at one juncture I must have spoken for getting on for five minutes, a feat unparalleled for me; but I knew my ground. It was of the academic Socialism and the newer kind, then just showing over the horizon, and perhaps better understood by those who like myself had gone through the fire than by any official. I was only interrupted once, by Pepper, when I mentioned Schmerveloff's name, the Russian social doctrinaire. "Ah yes, your neighbour," he murmured, and I went on....