Had there ever been any shadow of a division between Evie and myself, which there had not, it must have vanished now. I did not attempt to conceal from myself that her gifts did not extend in all directions equally. Socially expert in Pepper's sense, for example, she could hardly yet be expected to be, and I should have been unreasonable to have reproached her for not grasping the intricate problems that, if the truth must be told, frequently filled Pepper and myself with perplexity. But these things are independent of deep humanity, and by as much as she fell short in them she was richly dowered in other ways. It was still the love of a woman I wanted, not the semblance of a masculine friendship; and I had it, and was glad at the thought of my rich possession. Often, for pure emotion, I caught her in my arms when I saw her, rejoicing yet timorous before that which was presently to come to pass; and whether it was a pallor that sometimes crossed her face, or a sudden glow as of some warm and Venetian underpainting or else a smiling, happy lassitude infinitely moving in its appeal, all spoke of the pledge that had been given and taken between us.
Quite past telling was the peace this pledge brought to me. I was, after all, to begin anew. Despite Life's mauling of my hapless self, here was a tiny white leaf preparing for the writing of a record that should supersede and obliterate my own. Deeper things than men know were seeing to that ushering, and by nothing less miraculous than a birth was I going to be delivered from the body of that haggard death. Often, as I seemed to be busily writing at our small folding table, I quite lost myself in the contemplation of this coming manumission; and day by day, looking out over Waterloo Place and the Mall, I conjured up her image—resting while Aunt Angela (who now came up from Woburn Place almost daily) dusted or swept or washed up, taking her easy walks on the Heath, sewing (though not now for herself), or doing such light work as would not tire her. Fortunately, the Social Question next door had reached the crisis of over-production in the beaten-copper market; a glut had supervened; and the making of the wooden bowls and carved porridge-sticks that are designed for oppressed serfs and sold at a high price to the amateurs of the Difficult Life, caused less disturbance to our panels and pictures. The whooping child too had gone.
Aunt Angela had bought Evie a deep wicker basket lined with pale blue, and with the greatest circumspection I delayed to fill this basket too quickly. We talked for a week before making a purchase, and,in one case, for quite three weeks. This was when I bought, at a shop near Great Turnstile, what Evie called a "jangle"—a beautiful Jacobean coral mounted in silver, with many silver bells and a faint piping whistle at one end. Both as I entered the shop and left it again a grey nightmare tried to fasten itself upon me, of a woman who had forgotten where she lived, walking the Fields round the corner, alone at night; but I shook the horror off.... Even down to such details did I keep Evie from fancies—for she had fancies, the ousting of which was a matter for diversion rather than argument. One of these fancies was that she now wanted to see Miriam Levey. Another was that she did not want, just then at any rate, to see Louie Causton.
For as it chanced, Louie came the nearest (though with a nearness sad enough) to a married woman of anybody she happened at present to know; this, of course, largely as a result of my own exclusive attitude. Aunt Angela, by virtue of George and her other experiences, knew as much as ten married women, and that was frequently precisely the difficulty. Certain charwomen, I gathered, inured to immoderate families, gave Evie the benefit of their advice now and then, but that was about all. And it was one evening as I cast about for an opening to introduce Louie's name that Evie herself said once more that she would like to see Miss Levey.
"Certainly," I said, with a readiness that was onlythe result of seeing no way out of it this time. "As long as she won't tire you."
"I won't let her do that," Evie promised.
"All right," I said.... "And by the way"—I put this as if it had just occurred to me—"should you care to have Louie Causton up if Billy knows where to find her?"
"Yes, I should some time—but not just now, dear. You'll tell Miriam, then?"
"Yes."
I had promised it before I remembered something that might have made me less ready to promise it. It was now the beginning of October. We had to take our holidays in rotation at the F.B.C.; for a fortnight I had been working late in order that Whitlock might take his; and next on the list in our department was Miss Levey. Grumbling that it was almost too late to take a holiday at all, she was going away for a week-end only. Instantly, I saw what that meant....
The next day I capitulated to her as gracefully as I could.
"You'll be able to have a really satisfactory visit now, a whole day," I said. "It would only have been a couple of hours before."
"I'll takesuchgood care of her!" she purred.
"I am sure you will," I said conciliatingly....
Three days later Miss Levey was up at Verandah Cottage. She was up there the next day also.Although she had always gone by the time I returned at night, she was up several times after that.
Well, it couldn't be helped ... and I was going to tell you, not about Miriam Levey, but about my happiness and Evie's.
Today, in my house in Iddesleigh Gate, there are many things thrust into dark corners that will ever occupy odd corners of my heart. They are the pieces of furniture from that poky old place in the Vale of Health. The people of my household tell me they are shabby, but as I never see them divorced from a hundred gentle associations, their shabbiness matters nothing to me. In the children's day-nursery there is the old shop-damaged couch from the Tottenham Court Road cellar. Its pegamoid is frayed and its springs broken, but Evie lay on it before those destructive little hands came into being. She lay on it with her legs wrapped in an old, faded, mignonette-coloured Paisley shawl—for presently the days were shortening, we had started fires, and Verandah Cottage was a Cave of the Winds for draughts; and my housekeeper had a bad five minutes only the other day when that shawl nearly went out of the house with the bottles and crates and old rags. The bookshelves Evie used to dust and polish still serve me; and quite a number of smaller things, including that first wicker basket into which the "jangle" was put (Evie keeps that) carry my mind back in a twinkling to that early time.
Evie had her little jokes about our unborn mite. Still further to repair the slight on Hampton Court of our Greenwich honeymoon, the infant at one time was to be called "Hampton," but as she had ten different names for it each week, a name more or less didn't matter. Its eyes were to be so-and-so—the colour also varied day by day. If a boy, it was to be of my own bone and stature; if a girl, less. I used to joke with her when, seeing her brooding and gently smiling, I pretended to discover these and a hundred other patterns and specifications in her eyes; but, however lovely these imaginings were, they were no lovelier than herself. Though the days now seemed less long, the littleélanswith which she ran to me when she heard my step at night were a passionate rendering of herself far greater than before; and I will end this part of my tale with the first time, the very first, I heard her sing.
She had gone into the bedroom that night, and I had heard her moving about; and then there had stolen out low contralto notes that might have belonged to somebody else, so new were they to me.... She was happy. She was so happy that she was learning to sing. I stood listening, with tears gathering in my eyes and suddenly rolling down my cheeks....
She was happy....
She did not know why, a few moments later, with the face of one who hears joyful news, I pushed atthe bedroom door and took her, half ready for bed as she was, into my arms.
Oh, to hear her, of her own accord, sing—and to know that soon her song would not more gently rock those feeble limbs and close those unknowing eyes than it now brought rest to my own weary frame and sleep to my own heavy eyes, weary with watching for the day that at last, at last was coming!
As far as my worldly position is concerned, two leaps have sufficed to place me where I stand to-day—the first from the Vale of Health to the Well Walk, not a quarter of a mile away, and the second from Well Walk to Iddesleigh Gate. I am omitting such interludes as furnished rooms for short periods and odd times in which I have packed Evie off with the children to the seaside. We were in the Vale of Health for exactly a year, and in Well Walk for three. I took the Iddesleigh Gate House, wonderful ceilings and Amaranth Room and all, from the late Baron Stillhausen.
But this is a very summary statement of what my real advance has been. Those who have called me a lucky man—which on the whole I also am persuaded I am—know nothing of my hidden labour. Of this, since it is just beginning to show in the contemporary history of my country, I cannot say very much; and so, picking out a fact here and an incident there, I shall take leave for the rest of my tale to keep as closely as may be to my increasingly intricate personal story.
The incident with which I will resume—the incident which resulted in Louie Causton's appointmentto the post still held by Miss Levey—came about as follows.
In taking the Well Walk house—(here I am skipping six months; my infant son was born; I still had seven or eight weeks to run with the F.B.C., but already our plans were perfected, and the new Consolidation had already secured its premises in Pall Mall)—in taking the Well Walk house I had made a woeful miscalculation of how far the Verandah Cottage furniture would go. Indeed I had so over-estimated its quantity that our new abode was almost as bare as a barracks, and, occupied as I was with important business, I had almost got used to its barrenness. But as Evie had to live in the place, I had found that I really must raise a sum of money for carpets, curtains, and other things indispensable to married folk who find themselves three; and I had decided that part of the one hundred pounds I got as an advance from Pepper was going to be spent on a dining-room table that I had not always to remember I must not sit down on. Well, on a Saturday afternoon in October this table came. I saw it into the dining-room, and then, feeling the need of air, I put on my hat and coat and took a walk as far as the Whitestone Pond. There I met Billy Izzard, in the dickens of a temper.
"Well, how goes it, Billy?" I asked cheerfully, seeing that he was put out. Billy's grumblings always have the effect of cheering me up.
He looked up, scowled, and then resumed his gazing across the Pond. Then he watched the passage of a horse and cart through the water, looked up again, and broke out.
"It goes rottenly—that's how it goes!" he growled. "Do you remember coming into my place one evening when I had a girl sitting for me—tallish girl, with a perfectly exquisite figure—Louie Causton her name was?"
I said that I did remember it.
"Well, she's the trouble. I want her—must have her—and I can't get her. She says she isn't sitting any more; her doctor's forbidden it. Her doctor!... The jade's as sound as a bell; she never had a doctor in her life, I'll swear; she just won't sit, doesn't want to. She wheedled that sketch out of me too, the one I was doing that day—walked off with it under her arm—stole it, practically—and now I can't get her for love or money."
This interested me. It interested me so much that to conceal my interest, I made a joke. "Oh? Tried both?" I said; but Billy went on.
"Perhaps she'll change her mind when she finds she's nothing to live on. She'll sit in costume, it appears; some cock and bull story about chills; and she said, Couldn't I paint her in some old supers' duds that she can hire at the Models' Club for sixpence a day?—me painting theatrical wardrobesà laColeman, Roma?... And her crochet!"
"What about her crochet?"
"Her crochet? Why, when I told her she wouldn't make fifteen shillings a week as Marguerite with the jewel-casket—she's not pretty—I told her so—she said she could fall back on her crochet! A goddess, I tell you ... and she pitches me a tale about a doctor that she can't help laughing at herself!"
He ran on, to Louie's detriment from his special point of view, but already I was wondering what her own point of view might be.
That I had not heard from Louie since that night of the Berkeley dinner had been, as far as it went, reassuring. Had she needed me, or I her, whichever in the tangled circumstances it might be, I should have heard from her; and I had had no reason for seeking her out. When Evie had told me that Louie now had charge of Kitty Windus she had told me nothing that I had not already known; and as Evie had had this from Miriam Levey, I find I must break off for a moment to speak of my relation with that lady.
Since she had got her fat, high-heeled foot inside my door, Miss Levey's devotion to Evie had been as unremitting as if, lacking her attentions, my little son would never have got himself born at all. Not a week had passed but she had dropped in once or twice, mostly alone, but not infrequently with the ringleted Aschael. It annoyed me that Evie shouldlike her as much as apparently she did, and my annoyance was the greater that I could give no reason for it. One night I had given way rather petulantly to this annoyance. It had been just before we had left Verandah Cottage. Billy Izzard had come in and had made some remark about our Arab horsemen, and, more that I might relish its artistic vulgarity than for any other reason, I had taken one of these objects down from the mantelpiece. I had not known that I had held the thing in a rather vindictive grip until suddenly the plaster had broken in my hand. My other hand had made an instinctive movement by no means prompted by presence of mind. I had saved the body of the ornament from total smash, but the heads both of tamer and steed were in fragments. I had been on the point of throwing the ridiculous thing away, but had changed my mind, and put it back on the mantelpiece. Later I had expressed bland sorrow to Miss Levey, and had assured her that I was going to have it mended; but I had not done so during the remainder of our stay at Verandah Cottage. I did not know what had become either of it or of its companion statue.
During the last anxious days before the birth of our child, Miss Levey had triumphed over me completely. There had been no withstanding her. She had bidden me fetch hot-water bottles, had informed me when it was time for Evie to go to bed, and, conspiring with Aunt Angela, had, in a word, takenthings out of my hands entirely. Once or twice she had overdone this even in Evie's eyes, but I had been dull enough not to see at first that her ascendancy over Evie was not direct, but mediate. Only lately had I discovered that Evie's real interest was, not in Miriam Levey, but in Kitty Windus.
For those talks I had dreaded yet had been powerless to prevent had already borne fruit. I don't think it was so much that Evie experienced again those compassions and magnanimities that had given her that gentle heartache in the tea-gardens on that Bank Holiday evening, as that she remembered the wish into which they had solidified—the wish to have Kitty completely off her mind. Miss Levey, I was pretty sure, had seen to it that this wish should become firmly fixed. She had evidently assumed, for example, that I should be adverse to a meeting between Kitty and Evie. "Your husband wouldn't like it," I could imagine her as having said; "quite naturally, my dear; one can't blame him; and so I suppose that ends it." And to the last words I could imagine her as having given the meaning, "We do seem to be dependent on the will of this dull opinionative sex for some reason or other—why I can't make out." Miss Levey, you see, was an economically emancipated woman.
So, though not a word had been said, Kitty had come, by reason of I knew not what sympathy Miriam Levey had worked up on her behalf, to be betweenEvie and myself. That poor Kitty deserved all the sympathy we could give her I had never a doubt, but you see the two things that stood in the way—the lesser thing that Miss Levey assumed I "should not like," and that other huge and fatal thing that was the truth. To the multitudinous harassings of my business these two things made a dense background of private harassings.... But I did not intend that another long and dogged duel should begin between Miriam Levey and myself. She was not going to be taken over by Pepper, Jeffries and the Consolidation. If this enterprise did anything at all it would do something very big indeed; soon I should be placed high above the wretched little Jewess's power to hurt; and after all, there is no man who attains to great power but leaves in his train a score of these carpers, wishful yet impotent to harm.
But the offering of the new post to Louie Causton was another matter. I hesitated and wavered. Plainly, I doubted whether I had the right to find Louie a job. In the close-packed fulness of her life, struggles and anxieties and all, her happiness consisted; and though she might need the money, as matters stood she had a peace that money could not give, and might take away. Let her, I thought at first, toil and keep her heaven.
But that, I thought presently, might be all very high and fine, but practically not very much to the point. Billy had been perfectly right when he hadsaid that by costume-sitting and crochet she would hardly make fifteen shillings a week. I knew of old what heaven in those circumstances meant, and I had had no boy to look after, and no woman intermittently infirm. One can have too much even of heaven on those terms....
And yet it would be impossible to attach her to my own office. What I had seen in those grey eyes on the night of the Berkeley dinner would not brook daily meetings, dictation of letters, and the other duties I had already cast Whitlock for. Myself left out of the question, she, I was quite sure, would never accept it. Turn her over to Pepper, then? That would hardly be fair to Pepper, who might wish to choose for himself....
And one other thing, of which I will speak presently, had already caused my cheeks to burn.
Well, I should have to see what I could do.
It did not surprise me much that when I reached Well Walk again, Miss Levey was there. That echoing, half-furnished house of ours, I ought to say, was on the south side of the Walk, and my own study was on the ground floor at the back, with Evie's drawing-room immediately overhead. I heard this drawing-room door open as I entered, and it was on the bare half-landing, against the red and blue window, with cut-glass stars round its border, that I saw Miss Levey's flamingo-coloured costume with the black satin buttons.
"Oh, here he is," Evie was saying; "he'll take you on to your bus. Good-bye, Miriam, dear—remember me to Aschael——"
"Good-bye, darling—don't forget, will you?"
"Good-bye."
I remember that it was as I took Miss Levey to her bus that afternoon that she asked me to call her by her Christian name. Instantly I did so—and forgot her request again with a promptitude even greater. To tell the truth, that "Remember me to Aschael" of Evie's stuck a little in my throat. A little more ceremony, it seemed to me, would have fitted the relation better, and I differed from Miss Levey if she thought that in asking me to call her "Miriam," she, and not I, was conferring the favour. Therefore as I saw her off I again addressed her as "Miss Levey" and let her take it as an inadvertence or not as she list. Then, with that "Remember me to Aschael" again uppermost in my mind, I returned to Evie.
In hoping to see her alone, however, I was again disappointed. This time Aunt Angela was there. She was standing by the new dining-table, and apparently deploring my purchase.
"Whata pity!" she was saying. "Just when I'd arranged for you to have that one of mine! I meant it as a surprise—oh, why didn't I tell you sooner!"
I have referred, I hope not unkindly, to a certainlaxity in this dear and harmless spinster's hold on life. Since the birth of our child this laxity had become intensified, if such a word can be used of laxity, and very rarely had she come up to see us empty-handed. From some mysterious hoard of belongings that seemed ever on the point of exhaustion and yet ever stood the strain of another gift, she had brought, now a tiny pair of knitted woollen socks, now a shawl, now a bit of silver, and even the mite's cradle was that in which Evie herself had been rocked. She found a pleasure quite paradisal in these continual givings. I think they were her spiritual boasts of how little she required for herself.
"Whata pity!" she purred again. "But I dare say they'd take it back——"
"Hallo!" I said, shaking hands. "Take what back? What's that you're saying?"
"This table. I'm sure they'd let you off your bargain for ten shillings or so. The money would be so much more useful."
I laughed. "Oh, money's no object," I said.
This, of course, was mere mischief. The truth was that Angela Soames, like Evie, had begun to hold my ambition a good deal in dread. It had been good fun to think about in the early stages; they had enjoyed that part as much as anybody; but to take the plunge as I was taking it was—in Miss Angela's case I might almost say "impious"; certainly it was a storming of destiny that was bound to bring a crop of consequences they were sure I hadnot sufficiently weighed. So it had become my habit to hold their timidity over them as a joke, talking sometimes in sums that might have staggered even the Consolidation. "Oh, money's no object!" I said, laughing.
"Well!" Aunt Angela retorted, "even you can't afford to throw it away till you've got it. So, Evie, I thought my round table in place of this one—send this back—and the tea-urn I promised you in the middle of the sideboard, with Mr. Pepper's candlesticks on each side of it—just here—and you could buy a quite nice pair of curtains with the pound Jeff turns up his nose at."
I interrupted. "Your tea-urn? Oh, come, come! We're not going to accept that!"
But she only dropped her eyes. "My wants are few," she said, "and I've more than enough for them. You young people come first. How do you know I haven't had a legacy?... And of course I shall have the table repolished, Evie, and if Jeffwillbe stupid, you can have it in the drawing-room, in that corner by the bureau——"
I was about to laugh again at the artless mixture in her of expansive unworldliness and quite astute machination when suddenly I thought better of it, and turned away. Aunt Angela was taking off her hat and giving coquettish touches to her tall, snowy hair. As that meant that she proposed to spend the evening with us, I had to postpone what I wished to say to Evie until she should have departed.
This was no more than that I thought the Christian name business was being a little overdone; but the more I thought of it, the less easy did it become to put. Perhaps you see my difficulty. It was, in a word, this: that a man on whom circumstances have pressed with such unique urgency that he has had, or conceived himself to have, no choice but to effect the removal of a fellow-being from the world, cannot take even so small a matter as this precisely as another man can. The quick of his soul is perpetually exposed. There are no trifles in his world. What is another man's slight annoyance is to him the menace of an assassination; another's nothings are his doom. A single unconscious touch and the toucher starts back with an amazed "What's this?"
Yet I have said that it was not remorse that bred this sensitiveness in me, and I hasten to maintain that. Remorse is a damage, in which a man is penally mulcted; but this of mine was no more than a price, fairly and squarely agreed upon, which I was prepared to pay. It was a heavy one; you may take my word for it that there is no more costly purchase in the whole market of human happenings than a righteous murder; but it still remained a price, in thefixing of which I had concurred. More than this: men have been known, from remorse, to give themselves up; but at the thought of such a surrender I grew hot and vehement. I appreciated the point of view of the very revolutionaries against whom my life's work has been directed. What! Suffer an outside judgment when I was acquitted in my own!... I laughed, and in my laughter found courage. Not I!...
And a man is not in the grip of remorse who, asked whether he would do his deed again, can reply with a deep "By heaven—yes!"
Nevertheless, I was perilously open. I alone among men could not rebuff the freedom of a Christian name without bringing my soul into the transaction; nay, I could not even buy a dining-table without having (as I had just had) to check an utterance and to turn away. For at Aunt Angela's words, "How do you know I haven't had a legacy?" I had become vigilant again. She had had no legacy; I knew that; but shehadbeen twice or thrice to Guildford, and, if she wished to indulge herself in the luxury of giving, would be likely to make the most rather than the least of whatever mementoes of the late Mrs Merridew she might have chanced to come by. You see how, on an afternoon taken at random, two nothings had made still denser by a fraction that background of which I was every moment conscious. I was beginning to realise that Iwas the man who was denied the luxury of carelessness. I might not jest or laugh or move a finger without first looking around the corner. I went hampered among free men. I tell you it is a hard thing to live in a world that has no trifles....
Still, exposed or guarded, I had my life to live, and I was no longer disposed in the matter of this intimacy with Miss Levey to do nothing at all. Therefore, when I returned from seeing Aunt Angela away and found Evie still in the dining-room, I took my risk.
She ought to have been in bed; but instead she had drawn up a chair to an old bureau, and was quite unnecessarily fiddling with old papers and letters and nondescript objects put away in the nest of drawers. She looked up as I entered, and the vivacity with which she spoke seemed a little forced.
"Fancy, Jeff!" she exclaimed, her fingers in the leaves of some old twopenny notebook or other, "I can actually read my old shorthand yet! I should have thought I'd forgotten all about it, after all this time! I'll bet I could read as quickly as you!"
I stirred the dying fire. "Isn't it time you were in bed?" I said.
"Oh, just let me tidy this—I sha'n't be many minutes."
And while I picked up an evening paper she went on with her pottering about the bureau.
But the light sound of the moving paper began toget a little on my nerves. It does that sometimes. I suppose it's like some people fidgeting if there is a cat in the room. And presently I noticed that when she supposed me to be busily reading the rustling stopped. It was no good going on like this; the sooner I came to the point and said what I had to say, the better. I thought for a moment, and then put down my newspaper.
"Evie——" I said.
"Yes, dear?" she said brightly....
I put it with perfect gentleness. Suddenness and sharpness also are among the trifles of life I had had to forego. When I had finished, she did not seem surprised. She only nodded once or twice.
"I see," she said slowly. "Well, Miriam—I mean Miss Levey, if you wish it, dear——"
"No, darling; I don't know that I go as far as that. I was only speaking of these broadcast intimacies."
"Miriam, then—Miriam said you would object——"
"Well, I never denied Miriam a certain acuteness."
But she shook her head. For a minute or two I had been sure that I was not the only one who had something to say. When she did go on, it was at first haltingly, and then with just such a little setting of her resolution as she had used when, years ago, a sweet and awkward flapper, she had complimented me onmy spurious engagement to the lady whose name she now suddenly mentioned.
"I don't mean to object to—to what you've been saying, Jeff. I mean—I mean object to this about poor Kitty. I know," she quickened, as if to forestall a remark, "that we haven't said anything about it—you and I—for a long time—but"—once more the rush—"I've felt you've known what I've been thinking, Jeff——"
I gained a little time. "But I wasn't speaking of Kitty Windus, dear," I said. "It was something quite different."
Then, before her look of trouble and appeal, I ceased my pretence.
"Very well, dearest," I sighed. "But tell me one thing. If I hadn't said anything to-night,youwanted to say something."
"Yes," she mumbled in a low voice to the twopenny notebook.
"Is that what Miss Levey meant when she said 'Don't forget' an hour or two ago?"
"Yes."
"You hadn't to forget to—to bring something, whatever it is, up about Kitty?"
Her silence told me that that was so. Then, slowly:
"And why should she think I should object to that?" I asked.
Evie's manner changed with almost electricalsuddenness. She thrust her hands into her lap, straightened her back, and spoke almost victoriously.
"There!Iknew! I told her so!" she triumphed. "'Miriam,' I said, 'you'requitewrong in thinking that—that——'"
"In thinking there's something to be ashamed of in an old engagement you've changed your mind about?" I suggested gently.
"Yes!" she exulted. "I said to her, 'Jeff wouldn't in theleastmind my going to see her if I wanted'—and you wouldn't, would you, Jeff?"
"No," I said quickly. I said it quickly lest I should not say it at all. Then I qualified. "No.... One shrinks from pain, that's all, either enduring it or giving it."
"Giving Kitty pain?"
"Well, does Miss Levey think it would be pleasant to her—or is she merely willing to hurt her if she can hurt me too?"
"But—but—Miriam says she would really be awfully pleased—Kitty would—and I'm sure you're wrong, Jeff, about things like that lasting for years and years! They don't. I——" She checked herself.
But whether it was the check or what not that made the difference, all at once she started forward from the bureau and sank on her knees at my side. She herself put one of my hands about her waist, as if to compel it to a caress, and stroked her cheekagainst the other. The words she murmured were disjointed enough, but her tone was, oh, so eloquent....
"Dear, dear!" she besought me. "Miriamwaswrong, wasn't she? Not that I care in the very least, only I've been, oh, so wretched, thinking there was something between us! I don't want to see her—Miriam—nor Kitty—very much—but it was so lonely—till Jack came—and there isn't anything now, is there, Jeff? I know there has been—but it's gone now, hasn't it?... Great strong hand!" She moistened it with her breathing.... "But itisall right now, isn't it, Jeff?"
I did not know why, all in a moment, I found myself remembering that curious prophecy of Louie Causton's: "I think you'll find that sooner or later you've got to tell her." Perhaps it was that in that moment I had my first glimpse of what Louie had really meant. Already it was useless to say there had been no slight shadow between us; Evie, who knew few things, at least knew that; but I had not dared to acknowledge it for fear of worse.... Yes, I began to see; and with my seeing I again grew hot and rebellious.
Why, since the act I had committed had had at least as much of good as of evil in it, should I be hounded thus? Why should trifles accrete to an ancient and hideous memory until it became a corporeal, living, malignant thing? Why should thatcommonest of experiences, an old rescinded engagement, not, in my case also, be what Evie thought it was—a wound made whole again, or at any rate so hardened over that it could be touched without provoking a sharp scream of pain? It was intolerable....
Oh, never, if you can help it, live in a world without trifles!
Evie, at my knee, continued to supplicate. "Oh, darling, I've so,sowanted it to be like it was at first! Do you remember—in Kensington Gardens, sweetheart?"
And she turned up those loveliest eyes I ever looked into....
It had been in Kensington Gardens, early on a September evening, that I had asked her to marry me. Our chairs had been so drawn back into the clump of laurels that the man with the tickets had not noticed us, and we ourselves had seen little but a distant corner of the Palace, and, forty yards away across the grass, a dead ash gilded by the setting sun. At the F.B.C. Pepper had just begun to single out his new Jun. Ex. Con. for special jobs, and as a matter of fact I had had a small rise of salary that very week. Little enough it had been; certainly not enough to warrant me in exchanging our footing—one of increasingly frequent calls at Woburn Place and goodness knows how much lingering in likely streets on the chance of a sight of her—for a moreexplicit relation; but—well, as I say, I had thrust all else recklessly aside, and that evening had asked her to marry me.
There are some things that one must needs exaggerate if one is to speak of them at all; so if I say that at first it had seemed to her that my proposal was merely that two bruised spirits should thenceforward make the best of things together, I must leave you to discount that. I don't think she had known clearly what she had felt. The hand I had taken had trembled a little, and in the great dark eyes that had looked steadfastly away to the dead ash I had fancied I had discerned the beginnings of a refusal—a refusal out of mere customariness and a settled acceptance of our former relation. I had fancied that——
But even to the trembler a tremble may speak truer than words, and she had trembled and become conscious of it. For the first time it had occurred to her, sweet soul, that we had been all unconsciously passing from friendship to love, and were now making the discovery together. She had not known that I had never had anything but love from which to pass; and another access of trembling had taken her....
"The last evening you and I had a walk together," she had whispered at last, her eyes still gravely on the pale ash, "we—we didn't think of—this."
(Did I mention that during all the time I had known her we had only spent one other evening out of doors alone together? It had been more than four years before, and we had heard a nightingale sing on Wimbledon Common.)
I had not answered. To allow the memory of that other evening to repossess her had seemed the best answer to make. For though we pack our hearts daily with the stuff of life, only time shows us which is the tinsel we have coveted, and which the lump we have not known to be gold. More than four years had passed; presently those four years would have opened her eyes to differences too; and so I had waited....
And, if not yet discovered, at any rate sudden and troubling new questions had crowded into her eyes as I had watched. Another silence of many minutes, then:
"We've been such friends up to now," she had faltered, as much to the darkening evening as to myself.
"Need that mean 'No,' Evie?"...
"I don't know—it's so—strange—I never——"
I had drawn a little nearer.
"Never? Never once? You never once thought that perhaps——?"
Then once more had come the memories of that other evening, with the unhappiness of another's bringing, and the comfort of my own. Night had begun to creep under the trees, but the shadows butmade zenith the purer. On such evenings lovers vie with one another in looking for the first star, but we were not lovers yet, and could see nothing save the ash, now become grey, and away to the north the faint yellow haze of the Bayswater Road. Evie's own figure had become dim until little of it had showed but the handkerchief in her lap, the narrow white stripe of her black and white blouse where her little black jacket parted, and, as at last she had turned, the motion of her eyes.
"You don't want an answer now, Jeff," she had said quickly, immediately dropping the eyes again.
But I had wanted my answer there and then.
"Now," I had replied as quickly as she, with I know not what grimness and resolution mingled with my tenderness.
"Not now, Jeff—I'm fonder of you than of anybody—you know that—but—but——"
But if her "buts" had included the vanished Kitty Windus, Archie Merridew, or anything else from that four-year-old dustheap, I had allowed them to avail her little. Over my heart too had come that nightingale's song, heard by a still mere, and her hapless sobbing on my breast because Life was harsh, and my own desperate struggle not to clasp her there and then. Repression so powerful as that had been is not given twice to a man, at any rate not to such a man as I; nor had I thought that she, whose tremors were more eloquent than her speech, had desired iteither.... "Not now, Jeff—please—soon——" she had half sobbed, shrinking as it were from the wonder of her own enlightenment; and her handkerchief had fallen to the grass....
The next moment, in returning it to her, I had had her in my arms.
Those truer tidings than any words of hers could give expression to had come from the lips that had not even sought to avoid mine. Sought to avoid them? I call the first star that peeped through the laurels to witness the handful of dust that friendship of ours had become. Speech? Language? She used neither; to me in that moment shewasboth speech and language—vocal flesh, her very hair and eyes an utterance. You will not ask me an utterance of what; I take my chance of being understood in the light of what Woman is to you. Make her what you will: a riddle herself—or the answer to the deepest enigma of the soul; as much earth as a man's hard hands must needs be filled with—or as much spirit as he can bear until he himself is all spirit; a lovely casket—yet not too lovely for the scroll of the Freedom it contains. Have it your own way. I only know that if she spoke thus I heard as if my whole body had been one attuned and exquisite nerve. We had drawn a little deeper into the laurels.... Again we kissed....
And in my heart there had been jealousy of no man, dead or living. That dead young man hadawakened her from sleep, but I had made her mine with her eyes wide open. He had taken her by surprise, but me she had chosen. And as our lips had met once more, I had known that she loved even the pain I caused her in straining her in my arms.
"You never once—never once thought of it?" I had said huskily at last.
"Dear—dear! HowwasI to?"
"Kiss me—kiss me——"
And now, on her knees at my knee by our dying dining-room fire, she asked me if I remembered that evening in Kensington Gardens.
All at once I vowed that I wouldn't stand it—wouldn't stand the intervention of anything on earth, whether of my own making or another's, between us and that first joy. And again, as I held her, I thought of Louie's words. Louie was right—or at least half right. For the present the shadow had passed, but unless I did something now, it would return. Again we should drift apart, and Miss Levey would keep us so. If I did not partly explain, circumstances might do so entirely. Yes, Louie was so far right. If I was to keep the dearest thing on earth to me, I must make a half-truth seem to guarantee the false remainder, and tell Evie of that cruel Kitty Windus episode.
And so I come to my first, though not to my last, attempt to tell without telling, and, as they say, to make my omelette without breaking my eggs.
Her cheek was still against my hand; I looked mournfully down on her. With such a goal it didn't much matter where I began.
"What do you suppose, darling," I began, "Miss Levey's object is in all this?"
Evie's eyes moved to the mantelpiece. It was a bare entablature of black marble, with nothing on it but a small Swiss clock and one or two cabinet photographs—no Arab horsemen. Shyly she glanced from the mantelpiece corner, where the horsemen should have been, to me.
"Yes, she asked to-day whether you'd got it mended," she murmured.
"Do you really like her?"
"I was so lonely, Jeff," she pleaded.
"Poor child!... Evie——"
She looked quickly up at my change of tone.
"What?"
"I want to tell you what her object is. I don't find it easy."
"What do you mean, Jeff?" she asked, strangely abruptly.
"And I'm afraid you won't find it easy either."
She had dropped my hand. "Jeff, what do you mean?"
"I mean that she thinks she's found out—is finding out—something discreditable about me."
At first I did not understand the change, almost to horror, that came into Evie's eyes. Only after amoment almost of fear of what I saw there did I fathom her thought. I don't know how men speak who have an unfaithfulness to confess to their wives, but it flashed on me that Evie actually thought it might be that—so can pure innocence and worldly experience be pierced by the same fear.
"Jeff," she said faintly, her colour all gone, "don't you—haven't you—loved me?"
"Loved you?" I laughed for the irony of it. "Yes, dearest," I said quietly, "I've loved you. Never fear for that. That was the beginning of it all."
"The beginning?"
"Of what Miss Levey thinks. Dear, could you bear to think she's right, and that I've been a blackguard?"
So great was her suspense that the little sound she made was one almost of irritation. "Oh, Jeff, say what you've got to say——"
"It's why I spoke of causing pain to Kitty Windus——"
"Oh, you're cruel——!"
I moistened my lips. "Very well...."
Locked up in my private desk, written in Pitman's shorthand, there lies a full statement of that curious affair of mine with Kitty Windus; but I am not going to quote from that statement here. So long as it is understood that that heartless thinghad existed side by side with a love for Evie that had never for a moment wavered, that is all that matters. I had now no longer a thought for the undesirableness, the danger even, of a meeting between Evie and Kitty; risky though that would be, I now saw nothing save that we were reunited, and that we could only remain so by passing on to her a portion of my shame. If you don't see this you are lucky. Your life has trifles in it. You can buy dining-tables, and use or reject the familiarity of Christian names. You have not had to carry upon your shoulders a weight greater than a man can support, nor to choose which portion you are to leave on the road behind you unless your back is to break. You have not known the conclusion to which—but you shall hear the conclusion to which I have been driven all in good time.
In the meantime, sparing myself in her eyes no more than I am sparing myself in yours now, I told her how little she had ever had to fear from Kitty Windus.
The hands of the tiny Swiss clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past ten by the time I had finished. I gazed at the clock dully, thinking for a moment how little time my recital had occupied. Then I remembered that the hands had pointed to half-past ten before I had begun.... Mechanically I took the clock down and wound it up. Towind up a clock was something to do until Evie should speak.
She had not once interrupted me. At one point of my story she had merely got up from my knee and seated herself in a low rocking-chair, in which she now rocked softly. As I still sat with the clock in my hands I tried idly to remember at which point of my story she had got up; it might be an indication of her state of mind; but I forgot this again, and found myself examining the back of the clock almost with curiosity. I did not look at her. I put the clock back on the mantelpiece again and once more sat down, still without looking at her. Glancing presently at the clock again I saw that its hands pointed to five and twenty minutes to eleven. I had wound it up, but had forgotten to set it right. That again was something to do. I adjusted it by my watch, and again sat down.
Then she spoke, and my heart sank. There was nothing in her tone but wonderment—wonderment, not at the story I had told her, but that I should have found it worth telling at all.
After all that portentous preparation—only that!
Odd enough, of course—sad enough, if you liked—but——
"Well, but, Jeff," she said, puzzled, "what about it?"
"Don't you see?" I asked, in a lower voice.
"Of course I see—how do you mean, 'see'?And I think you were awfully stupid. She wasboundto find out, and she did find out, and left you, poor dear. It was absurd from beginning to end. Really I shall begin to think myself clever and you a simpleton, if that's all you've been moping about."
As you see, I had not advanced matters by one single inch.
"Itisall, isn't it, Jeff?" she asked anxiously, suddenly sitting forward in the rocking-chair. "I don't mean," she went on more anxiously still, "that the whole thing wasn't awfully queer—not quite nice, dear, to speak the truth—but—but"—again there returned that quick look of fear with which she had asked me whether I had not loved her—"but—there wasn't—anything—Jeff?"
I sank back in my chair.
"No, there wasn't—anything," I said wearily.
"Then, Jeff——" she cried gladly.
And the next moment she was at my knee again, overflowing with comfort and compassion.
"You poor boy—you poor darling boy!" she crooned, so melted by my contrition that my offence went uncondemned. "Poor love!... And," she looked adorably up, "howcouldEvie reproach you, Jeff, when it was all for her? Darling!" she broke out, "youought to reproachme, for thinking.... But you were so fearfully solemn.... I thought perhaps you hadn't loved Evie....Hasalwaysloved Evie, hasn't he? Andwillalways love her, yes? Great strong hand!"
And as she murmured thus, again I thought of Louie. It was with something like awe that I did so. "I think you'll find that sooner or later you've got to tell her." How did she know that? Did she know it? Had she foreseen how half-attempts would end, and known them beforehand to be wasted breath?
Then there came upon me the great need to see Louie again. I must see her, and quickly. With Evie still unenlightened, the actual perils of a meeting between herself and Kitty stood forward again, exactly as before. Evie herself might not now wish for such a meeting, but that would be on my account, and not that, if Kitty didn't mind, or positively wished it, she saw any reason against it. Why should she, if Kitty didn't?... Yes, I must see Louie again, at once. To-morrow was Sunday. I must see her on the Monday. I must write—telephone—do something——
"And to-morrow, Jeff," Evie was saying, with decision, "you really must have a walk. You're working yourself ill—you look worried to death. I can't come, of course, but I wish you'd go to Amersham or Chalfont or somewhere, just for a blow. Leave horrid business just for one day, and I'll have a nice supper ready for you when you come back. I shall be all right.... Hush! Listen!"
From upstairs had come a low, reedy cry.
"That's Jackie—I must fly! Don't sit down here, dear—come now——"
And she was off.
I followed her; and as I stood looking down on the boy, who had gone to sleep again of himself, I remembered my former dream, that by the wonder of an innocent birth atonement was to have come. I sighed. Apparently it hadn't.
Well, I must see Louie on the Monday, that was all.
I did see her on the Monday. I saw her at the models' Club, to which place I telephoned early on the Monday morning. I had the luck to get on to her immediately. "Yes?... This is Miss Causton," came the diminished voice over the wire; and she said she would see me that evening at seven. I sent Evie a message that I should be late.
Perhaps you know those premises in the Chelsea Square. Two houses have been thrown into one, but all I know of the establishment is the two rooms of the ground floor, which, barring a narrow passage with a rustling bead curtain across it, communicate. The room on the left of the curtain is a large bare apartment that is used for parties, tableaux, dancing and such like entertainments; that on the right is the tea-room, sewing and wardrobe room, and room for general purposes. At one end of it is a kitchener; placed near the kitchener is a small service counter, brass foot-rail and all, that has done duty in some saloon bar or other—it was probably picked up in the York Road, N.; and the furniture has been given piecemeal by artists and is characterised by great variety. The members can get tea for threepence halfpenny and dinner for eightpence; and of courseI was Louie Causton's guest. She was looking out of the window as I approached the house; she herself opened the door to me; and we walked through the bead portière and entered the party-room on the left. We sat down by a yellow upright piano at the farther end of this room. I heard the frying of chops across the passage. They wouldn't be long, Louie said, and then added that I was looking pretty well.
A long walk round Chalfont Woods the previous day had, in fact, done me good. She herself appeared to be in excellent health and spirits. She asked me whether I had seen Billy Izzard lately, and then, without waiting for an answer, laughed as two girls, in waltzing attitude, balanced in the doorway for a moment, and then, seeing us, went out again. "The girls dance in here," Louie explained. "Oh, do you?" I remarked. "Oh,Idon't," was her reply; and she went on to ask what was new with me. It was all refreshingly ordinary and matter-of-fact, and there was no indication that she had any serious care on her mind.
A stout woman in an apron appeared in the doorway and announced that our chops were ready. We passed into the other room. I said that the furniture of the Club had been given by artists; the table at which we sat down had been a card-table. As I could not get my legs under it I had to sit sideways at it, and our plates, cups and saucers wereedge to edge, with the salt and pepper in the interstices. Louie smiled and said something about our interview being literally a tête-à-tête, and we attacked our chops.
From where I sat I could see the vista of the party-room across the passage, and Louie's eyes, as they met mine from time to time, had something of the same soft sheen of the polished floor of that apartment. She wore a navy blue skirt and plain white mercerised blouse without collar or any other finish at the neck; and as we ate and talked of this and that there rose in my mind again that surmise I had had when Billy had told me, by the Whitestone Pond, that she had stopped sitting. Nothing that I can describe happened to confirm that surmise, and yet somehow I was conscious of the growing confirmation. It had begun when she had twinkled and said, "How's Billy?" and a moment or two later, when the two girls had stood poised in the doorway for dancing, she had smiled and said, "Oh,Idon't dance." The twinkle about Billy had not been lost on me; and when I tell you that the single dance of my own life had been with her, years before, at a breaking-up party at the old Business College, perhaps you can make a guess at the nature of my surmise.
For I had read in those eyes of hers, on that night of the Berkeley dinner, that she loved me and must go on loving me; and she herself had said, inso many words, "It's nothing to do with you—you can't help that." And now she had taken this fantastic resolution not to sit any more. Whether I would have it so or not, she had a right in me, in which, quite calmly and ordinarily, she now exulted. Yet had ever before mortal woman exulted over anything less substantial? The whole thing seemed to me both preposterously lovely and quite movingly absurd. She had wheedled out of Billy that perfect sketch that had stood on his easel that evening I had walked, unannounced, into his room opposite the Cobden Statue. Why? What ridiculous and sacred tapers did she burn about it? Billy must now paint her in costume or not at all. Why? Of what beautiful and empty union was this a consummation? Did she seriously intend that thenceforward no eye but mine—— But I waste words. You see it or you don't see it. That, as near as makes no matter, appeared to be how things stood between us, and there was nothing to tell me that she was not happy in this beautiful lunacy. As for myself, I supposed I must be content to be owned almost to the point of insult in possession.
"I'm just beginning to get used to it," I remember she said to me at one stage of that evening—the thing she was just beginning to get used to being sitting under the new conditions. "Did you know it was really harder? Your clothes tingle on you, you know."
I mention this only to show that, since she might speak at her pleasure of a thing of which I might not even recognise the existence, her tyranny over me was pretty complete.
We had finished our chops, and I was wondering what she supposed my reason for having sought her to be, when she herself put the direct question. She put her plate on the floor so as to make room for her elbows on the table.
"Give me a cigarette if you have one," she said. "I'm afraid I've picked up that habit here. All the girls do it: there's a cigarette-case in their bags if there's nothing else."
And when I had given her a light, she put her elbows on the table again, her wrists and forearms fell into an attitude that really made me sorrow for Billy, and she said: "Well, what is it?"
With no more waste of words than she herself had used, I told her of Miss Levey's voracious curiosity, of Evie's perplexed sense of something unexplained, and of my own unsuccessful attempt to have my eggs and my omelette too.
She listened attentively: the change of which I shall speak in a moment did not come all at once. Other girls had now come into the Club, and two or three of them were gathered about a brown-paper parcel, some purchase of dress material or other which they were discussing with animation. Others fetched cups of tea from the saloon bar counter,eating and drinking, perched carelessly on the ends of tables, the spiral twist of the work of their stockings telling how readily they got into and out of their clothes.
Before I had finished my story Louie interrupted me with the first of a little series of detached remarks.
"One moment," she said. "When do you start—this Consolidation, I mean?"
"In a few weeks. We shall send some of the men on in advance in about a fortnight. Why?"
"You don't intend to take Miriam Levey over with you?"
"I do not."
"You don't suppose she doesn't know that?"
"Well?"
"Well—but go on." She made a little gesture. "I interrupted you."
I went on.
"Half-a-minute," she came in again presently. "All this was quite—— I mean, there was no quarrel?"
"With Evie? No—oh, no, no."
"Well——"
And the next time she interrupted me was merely to ask me whether I had another cigarette.
I admit that there had come over me as I had talked an increasing sense of the burden I had placed upon her. Nor do I mean that I had not had thissense before. I had, indeed, thought of little else during my walk to Chalfont the previous day. But it is yet another coin added to the price of a righteous but unlicenced slaying that a man's selfishness becomes merely inordinate. I had known more or less what she must bear; exactly what she had to bear it with I had taken for granted. She had perhaps herself to thank for that, and that tense and incredible calm she had shown on the night I had dined at the Berkeley. I had known the depths of her womanliness that other night; soon I was to learn the shallows of her femininity.
"Well," she said, when at last I had finished, "I really don't see what else you expected. And," she went on, but more slowly, and somehow as if she didn't quite trust herself, "I don't see either what you expect of me. I told you what I thought before."
"You mean that I should have to tell her?"
"Yes."
"Well, tell me why."
"You've just told me why."
"Well, put it another way. You see the frightful risk—to her. The question is, ought it to be taken?"
For a moment those tourmalines of her eyes seemed to flicker, as if she would have shown me again the abysses beyond them; but they remained shut as she spoke more slowly still.
"That's not quite the question. Can you—go on—as you are doing? And if you can't, what's the alternative?"
To that I had no answer to make.
Her cigarette had gone out, and her beautiful fingers were holding it listlessly. All at once I found myself noticing the contrast between her and the chattering group of models down the room. The girl with the brown-paper parcel had approached a cupboard and taken out some second-hand property or other of frayed velvet and torn gold: "It's hardly worth re-making: I vote we cut it up," I heard her say. And I wondered whether Louie had sat in the torn and tawdry thing—now that she had been warned against chills. The giggling and the skiddle of teacups went on, but Louie pressed her fingers on her eyeballs for a moment. Perhaps it was this pressure that made them, when she looked up again, seem dull and tired.
"At any rate, that's how it strikes me," she said.
She looked suddenly older—much older—so much older that it gave me a pang. During my walk on the previous day I had told myself over and over again that I must have made of her life also exactly what I had made of my own—a fearful thing without trifles; but I hadhadto tell myself, if you appreciate what I mean. Now, to see it with my own eyes was another matter. There was that other quantity, the quantity unknown to me but drearily familiar enough to her, I didn't doubt—Kitty.... A wordof advice to those who contemplate the putting out of a life on their own responsibility: When a woman, on a rainy night in St. James's Park, or wherever and whenever, lets you look down into her soul, and drops a plummet into your own, and asks you whether you are not a murderer, and you no more dare to lie than you would dare a foulness in the face of majesty, then do anything you like—fly from her, bite out your tongue, kill her also—but for mere pity of her don't answer "Yes." Don't, that is, unless you are sure that she will betray you. If you do, depend on it she'll ask you to a Models' Club or somewhere, and the horror of a life without trifles will come over you, and you'll see her press her fingers on her eyeballs and then look up again, five years older in as many minutes.
"What about Kitty?" I asked abruptly.
She answered quickly—too quickly: "Oh, Kitty's all right; you needn't bother about Kitty; leave her to me. As a matter of fact she's been awfully useful to me."
"How useful?"
"Oh, in quite the most material way," she said, with a short and mirthless laugh. "That's not been pure philanthropy, I assure you. I dare say you know——"
I did know that Kitty had perhaps a pound a week of her own money, from some tramways out Edgbaston way.
"And she types at home, too—authors' manuscript—when she can get it—and I save the ten shillings I had to pay somebody to look after the boy."
"And you yourself?" I ventured meaningly.
"Oh," she answered evasively, "we've not stuck fast yet."
"In spite of your chills," thought I; and then, as another burst of laughter broke from the girls down the room, I said aloud: "Tell me—I've never asked you—how did you drop into this kind of thing? You used to be at a business college."
Again she smiled. "Did I? Sometimes I can hardly believe that was I. It's precious little I learned there, anyway. And this other—I could explain to Billy—I'm not pretty, I know, not my face, but—well, it seemed a fairly obvious thing to do. There wasn't much else, anyhow, and remember I did fairly well out of it—better than most girls in offices."
She had grown faintly pink, and again the tourmalines had given, as it were, a half turn. I dropped my voice and looked earnestly at her.
"And these—chills—aren't they anything you could ever grow out of?"
The soft irradiation deepened as she looked as earnestly back at me.
"No," she said.
"I see. And what you learned at the College—have you forgotten all that?"
Then, looking almost challengingly at one another, we began to speak rather quickly, and a little elliptically.
"I think I can guess what you mean," she said, dropping her gaze again.
"I think you do."
"That's why I asked you just now when the Consolidation was starting.... You don't suppose she'll love you any more for throwing her out of a job, do you?"
"She can't hate me much more than she does."
"Well, you may depend upon it, she knows she's going."
"Well, that saves trouble."
"Oh, no, it doesn't."
"Ah!—You think not?"
"I'm sure not."
A pause.
"I gather you've seen her?"
"Oh, often."
"At your place?"
"Yes."
"I don't suppose you love her much. Why do you have her there?"
"You don't love her either. Why do you?"
"Well, there's Evie."
"And there's Kitty."
Another pause, and then: "I see."
Then suddenly I spoke a little more to the point.
"Well, would you accept the job if I could arrange it?"
She hesitated. "It's very necessary, of course, that I should do something."
"You'd take it?"
"I almost think—there's my boy, you see—but we'll talk about that in a minute. You were asking me about Kitty. I don't think you need worry about her. I keep her in hand. I don't think it would matter very much if she and your wife did meet, and, on the whole, you'd be doing more harm by objecting beyond a certain point than you would by allowing it. So, as far as she's concerned, things had better drift. The worst of it is"—again the fingers on the eyeballs—"they don't drift."
"Don't drift?"
"You know what Miriam Levey is."
I caught my breath. "You don't meanshe'sany idea——" I said quickly.
"Oh, none whatever," Louie said hurriedly. "I don't mean that at all. But Idomean she'd thoroughly enjoy seeing you made uncomfortable—got at—scored off—get her own back—you know what I mean."
"That's noth——" I began absently, but checked myself. "That's nothing," I had been on the point of saying, but there were no nothings for us. Louie's vigils must be as unremitting as my own.