Still, she must not forget that these things were diverting.
There was no class that night: Louie forced herself to apply herself to her book-keeping until half-past nine, and then went to bed. That, as has been said, was on a Thursday. On the following evening, feeling indisposed to work, she moved about the School, amusing herself to her heart's content. She was getting adept in the sport of it. She bandied back to Kitty Windus, with whom she found herself in talk, half-a-score of her own expressions: "Beg yours," "Granted," "As the poet says," and the like; and she all but openly stalked Mr. Mackie for the sake of the pearls that rippled from his lips. If Mr. Mackie had offered to take her for a walk or to a shilling hop at the Holborn Town Hall on the next blank evening, Lord Moone's niece, who must allow no chance of amusement to slip her, would have let him. Indeed, she was in two minds whether or not to go to this last place of entertainment alone.
It was not for another week that her amusement at the School in general and at Mr. Jeffries in particular became almost painfully ecstatic.
III
On that Friday afternoon she did not go home as usual to Sutherland Place to tea. She went instead to the tea-shop across the street the waitresses of which seemed to crowd upon her as if the width of Holborn did not exist. As she sat down at her little marble table she glanced involuntarily across to the windows of the Business School and for a moment dropped the mask to herself. "Dingy place!" she thought; "well, we're a dingy crew inside it." Then, after a long, long walk down Chancery Lane and along the Embankment almost as far as the ship-breakers' yard at Millbank, she returned to evening class.
It was the evening before the day when Polly Ross—she begged her pardon, Miss Evie Soames—was to go with her aunt to the house with the tennis-lawn at Guildford. Young Merridew was not at the School that evening; indeed, he had only been once in the evening all the week, and then, Louie had thought (dropping the mask for another moment) he had better have stopped away. In a word, she had not been sure that he had been entirely sober. But perhaps in that she had been wrong. It didn't matter. She set a wide difference between the gaieties of the sons of fancy stationers with a tidy bit coming in and such diversions as that to which her stepfather had once taken her, pigtail and all. Besides, if people didn't drink liquor she supposed her father would not be able to sell it.
On two occasions already during the past week that mask of her amusement had not so much fallen off as been twitched off before she herself had been aware. Very remarkably, both times the big leonine student, Mr. Jeffries, had been the twitcher. In both cases the actual incidenthad been the same—a glance, nothing more. But those two glances had set Louie very curiously indeed waiting to see whether a third surprise of the same funny kind would follow them.
The glances had been given by Mr. Jeffries, and they had been directed towards the Soames girl. There had seemed to Louie to be an extraordinary unfitness about them. Had the red-waistcoated boy stolen those glances Louie would have thought no more about it; he and Polly Ross were pretty much a pair; but they had surprised her coming from the other. Louie had been sure that on the first occasion Mr. Jeffries had fancied himself to be unobserved, for he had looked stealthily round about him, had waited for a moment, and then, moving his eyes only, had given that long, slow, daring, masterful look. This had been on the previous Monday evening, in the general room. A few minutes later Mr. Jeffries had gathered up his papers and had stridden past Evie Soames as if he had been unaware of her existence.
Even had something very similar not occurred again on the Wednesday evening, Louie would hardly have forgotten that look; but it had been repeated. But this time, finding Louie's eyes on him, he had seemed to guard himself, to busy himself quite fussily with his papers, and a little to overdo his sudden affectation of indifference. Louie admitted that it would be at her own risk that she put any interpretation that was not amusing on these trifles; but about the glances, their surreptitiousness and the man's deliberate attempt at concealment, there had been no doubt whatever. Polly herself, Louie had to admit, had been quite unconscious of either look. To all appearances, she had been thinking of nothing but of the new novelettein the Pansy Library, or else wondering whether the new pair of shoes she was to go down to Guildford in would come home in time.
On that Friday evening Louie again found herself a little less inclined for amusement than she knew to be good for her. She supposed she ought to work, for if book-keeping and typewriting and so forth were to be her living they might just as well be taken seriously; but she preferred to work where gossip was going on. So she began the evening in one of the days in theEof reference books, where Miss Windus and the thick-lipped Miss Levey were sitting on the short library-ladder, whispering and tittering. Louie opened one of the windows, for she found the place airless, and then idled towards her two fellow-students.
She had gathered that Miss Levey did not like her. Miriam Levey was far less stupid than Kitty Windus, and it was not safe to hand herclichésback to her. Indeed, she had given Louie a far too intelligent look when Louie had gratified this hunger for humour of hers at the unconscious Kitty's expense; and Louie had told herself that it might be as well to be a little more careful. They looked up as Louie joined them, but did not exclude her from their talk.
"Ivillfind out who she is!" Miss Levey was saying—her W's did sometimes become V's. "I shall plague him till I do!"
"He won't tell you, my dear—not if he wouldn't tell Archie."
"But did Archie actually say 'engaged'?"
"Well, a person's either engaged or not, I suppose."
"Oh no, my dear, not by long chalks! Vy, you mightas well say that Archie and Evie are either engaged or not!"
"Well, they aren't—yet."
"'Yet'—there you are!"
"Well, I'll bet they aren't, even after this week-end. Why, they're no age!Idon't believe in getting yourself engaged and done for before you've had a good look round!" Kitty tossed her head.
"Vill you bet they aren't engaged in three months?" said Miriam Levey.
No, Kitty wouldn't bet that. She returned to the original subject, whatever that had been.
"It's all very well to say you'll find out, Miriam, but—how?"
Miss Levey tittered, and then suddenly said: "Ssss—I'll show you now! Just you watch me——"
She slipped noiselessly round to the cords of the window Louie had opened a few moments before.
No doubt her sharp eyes had seen Mr. Jeffries approach. She gave him a helpless look, and he took the cords from her fumbling hands and closed the window for her. It was the more cleverly done that she detained Mr. Jeffries and managed to get closed the window which Louie wanted open at one and the same time. She turned her prominent brown eyes in gratitude to Mr. Jeffries.
"Oh, thank you so much! You see, I've got rather a cold, and I'm going to a dance and don't vant to make it any vorse," she explained. "You don't dance, do you, Mr. Jeffries?"
But Mr. Jeffries merely replied "No," and turned away at once. Miss Levey turned to Kitty again.
"He needn't think he's put me off!" she said. "Ivillfind out! I shall offer him some tickets now, for self and lady. And I bet if she dances I'll make him buy them!"
Kitty tossed her head. "Ishould expect the gentlemanIwas engaged to to takemeto dances," she said.
"But Archie didn't say 'engaged.' Just after somebody, I should say—and don't I just vish her joy!"
"It's evidently nobody at the School," mused Kitty Windus. "Archie was almost certain about that."
"Vell, it isn'tme, if you're thinking of suspecting me!" said Miss Levey merrily. "Ivouldn't touch him with the end of a long pole."
"Chance is a fine thing, my dear," remarked Miss Windus.
"Opportunity's another." (This reply, Louie had noted, wasde rigueur.)
"I expect she types or something at his place in the City."
"She might be in an A.B.C. shop—no, a Lockhart's."
"Or a barmaid," Kitty hinted.
"Or his vashervoman."
"Oh, I expect he washes his own shirts."
"Perhaps he'll vash her blouses, too, whoever she is."
They both laughed.
Louie, her mask once more a little out of place, turned suddenly away.
Little as she had been inclined to work, she was now, somehow or other, not much more inclined for amusement. She wandered into the shorthand dictation class, but in a few minutes came out again. Then she walked into the lecture-room, where some example or other had been left chalked up on the big blackboard from the last lesson. Thence she went into the typewriting-room, and back tothe lecture-room again. Finally she got from the "library"—the little back room where the files and presses and gelatine copiers and a few books were kept—a number of old examination papers, and, finding a chair near the folding door that divided the lecture-room from the general-room, sat down and began to turn them over.
But she thought more of the conversation she had just overheard than she did of the examination papers. It had meant, as far as she had been able to make it out, that Mr. Jeffries had told young Merridew that he was engaged, or hoped to be engaged, to somebody outside the school altogether. That sounded—odd. Of course if Mr. Jeffries said so, Mr. Jeffries ought to know; but it is a difficult matter to disbelieve your own eyes. She supposed she had no choice but to disbelieve them, but—but—therewerethose two glances he had given at the Polly Ross girl—whom, by the way, she must learn to call by her proper name, Miss Evie Soames.
Louie was perfectly certain that she had not been mistaken in the nature of those two glances. Her reason for certitude was quite unassailable. She had known what they meant for the simple reason that she had never received such looks from a man herself.
Suddenly she dropped this mask of fevered amusement entirely. As she had once sat on the stile between Rainham Parva and the sea, so Louie now sat by the folding door—relaxed, thinking of nothing, or, if of anything, certainly neither of her late resolute pose nor yet of study. Her mind was what she had determined it should not be if she could help it—an empty chamber for unknown devils to enter.
Students passed and repassed. Weston had beenthrough several times, and twice Evie Soames had come and gone again. This so-much-talked-of Mr. Jeffries went into the library for a book and walked past with it again. He still wore that concealing ulster; the Soames girl had on a brown tailor-made and a cap of knitted white wool. Louie was hardly conscious that she noticed these things. She still sat, all slack and unbraced, with the examination papers on her knee.
All at once she came to herself. Why she should do so at that particular moment she did not know, but, doing so, she found herself completely awake again. To all intents and purposes she had come out of one of those naps which, lasting perhaps only a minute, have all the effect of a refreshing sleep. She could reassume her mask now. Evie Soames was talking to Weston by the blackboard; opposite her, a pale student called Richardson was copying down an exercise from a sheet on the wall; and she supposed Mr. Jeffries would be bringing his book back presently. Louie was as alive to her surroundings now as she had been oblivious to them a few moments before.
A minute later Mr. Jeffries, returning with his book, passed into the library. A few seconds later still Evie Soames had left Mr. Weston and had followed him.
"Now," thought Louie, "for a little more amusement."
The library had only one communicating door; its other door led only to a small room called the old ledger-room, a dusty cubby-hole, seldom entered, that had no outlet save the small pivoted window, high up, that gave on the head of the stairs. Mr. Jeffries and Miss Soames would have to come out by the same way they had entered, and Louie rather wanted to see them come out. It was no business of hers, but she had remembered those two glances and theconversation between Kitty Windus and Miriam Levey, and she had a perfect right to sit by the folding door and to use her eyes if she wished. She was now almost preternaturally awake. No jot of the jest, whatever it was, should escape her.
Evie came out first, after four or five minutes; but Louie was not interested in Evie. She was merely a dull tale: Louie wanted to see him.
Then, a moment later, he came.
But no amusement came with him. Instead, Louie knew not what sudden private ache stirred deep at her own heart. It was not a question of those two furtive, possessive glances now. Unmistakable enough those had been; you do not mistake the kind of glance for which you yourself have hungered when you see it given to another; but not only had Louie never seen—she had never, not even in her own rapt dreamings as a half-grown girl in her teens, thought it possible that a man's look at a woman could change his face as this man's face was changed now. It was irradiated, transfigured. He took no pains now to hide it. He could see clear down the room before him—could see (or so he evidently thought) any who saw him——
And since he did not see Louie by the folding door, Louie knew that in his former passings and repassings he could not have seen her either.
He disappeared. The Soames girl was waiting by the door, evidently for him. No doubt he was going to see her home. Probably she would have preferred the other, the little cad with the red waistcoat, but she had the lion——
He returned, with his hat on, and they left together.
But what had brought that sudden ache into Louie'sbreast? Mr. Jeffries was nothing to her. If his face shone, Louie's heart need not therefore ache. What ailed her?
Unmasked, as alive to things within herself now as she had just been to things outside herself, she sat, deeply wondering.
Against the wall at her left hand there stood a tall stationery cupboard. It had glazed doors, and the pale student called Richardson, coming up a moment ago to put his exercise-book back into its place, had left one of the doors open. The door moved on its hinges back into its place. With its motion there swung slowly into Louie's view the reflection of the grimy chandelier with its three naked gas-jets.
Was it this that reminded her of the night when she had swept out of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's French window with the yellow-shaded standard lamp mirrored in its pane?
It had been on that night——
Suddenly her eyes closed, as if closed eyes could have shut out a mental picture. Her lips trembled—voicelessly they shaped a name.
It was the name of Roy.
Hitherto she had hardly known what her feelings towards Roy really were. It had been in order to avoid asking herself that question, among others, that she had amused herself with Kitty Windus and welcomed the buffooneries of Mr. Mackie. But it presented itself to her startlingly now. Her own complete ignorance had just revealed a shining thing to her, the beautiful thing that had transformed Mr. Jeffries' face; now—handy-dandy—thatvery transformation threw her brutally back on her ignorance again.
She had thought she had sounded a mystery; had she, after all,notsounded any mystery, and was she to pay in labour and pain for nothing?
Her thoughts had flown back; they remained where they had flown. Good gracious! What an escapade! Without mercy for herself she examined it. What had really happened? Anything worth what it was about to cost?
The radiant look of another man at another woman answered her: No.
She had courted him—what a conquest! She had made him say she was pretty—what a victory! She had schemed, planned, ensured her kisses—what a triumph!... Why, she now asked herself for the first time, had she wanted to triumph? Why had she not seen sooner that what she had really wanted had been to be triumphed over? Triumph?—It came to her with a strange newness that women didn't triumph by triumphing. That man with the back like the church door, for example, who had just gone out with that pretty snippet——
Instantly, and with extraordinary resilience, her mind established a contrast.
No woman would have to cajole this shabby, lion-eyed man into admiration of her beauty. Rather she would have to save herself from his onslaught—and then, in her very flying, she would triumph. Louie had found a fool invincible; but this other, when he loved, would go down with the vehemence of his own assault. When Louie had refused to kiss Roy at their parting she had not known exactly why she had done so: she had obeyed an instinct;a chapter had been closed, and had had to be marked as definitely closed; her heart had known no rancour against him. But now!—she might just as well have kissed him. Now, in this strange place, two strange people—or rather one, for the girl mattered nothing—had in a moment, and infinitely, enlarged her sense of what, at any rate to a man, love might mean. In the light of that enlargement any kiss she could have given to Roy would have meant nothing—nothing, nothing. Poor Roy, whom she had had to woo! This other would do his own wooing. Why, he was doing it now——
Then a startling recollection caused Louie to sit suddenly upright. This lion, who had given those looks at that girl—this shabby giant, whose face she had just seen enheavened out of all knowledge—had told young Merridew, who had told Kitty Windus and Miriam Levey, that his heart was set on somebody outside this poky little Business School altogether!
Involuntarily Louie drew a long breath of amazement.
He had told them that!
Then Louie became matter-of-fact. There was one thing and one thing only to be said. If Mr. Jeffries had told him that, Mr. Jeffries had—lied.
She turned it over again—she found no flaw in it.
Yes, if he had said that, he had lied.
Louie pondered. The result of her pondering was that she said slowly to herself: "Ah—this is going to be more than amusing—unless I'm mistaken it might even become dramatic."
Up to the moment of this astonishing discovery—for Louie knew that she had made a discovery—Mr. Jeffries had been to her a phenomenon, different from Mr. Mackieand Kitty Windus, but not to be observed very differently; now in a twink she placed him in quite another category. Or, if she still lacked a category in which to place him, she certainly removed him for ever from the other. He had called suddenly on her profounder attention, and, as if he had struck upon a rock, the waters of it gushed forth. Apparently to others he was a butt, a jest, a pathetic figure; he was not that to Louie Causton now. They had said, Kitty and the Jewess, that Evie Soames and the red-waistcoated boy, off to Guildford together to-morrow, would before long be engaged to be married; but Mr. Jeffries, the third person in the commonest of dramas, and Mr. Jeffries, the introducer into that drama of a preposterous, impossible fourth actor, whose name Miriam Levey was resolved to know, were not one and the same man. Louie sat astounded again at his lie. It struck her as really in its way stupendous. Others thought he was below his fellows in this shabby little hutch of a Business School; not so Louie now! She saw those clear yellow eyes again. Ruses and machinations lived in them. A butt, with his brown-paper parcel? A pathetic figure, with his cadged baths? No—good gracious, no! The faces of butts and pathetic figures were rather less capable of irradiation. This man's kind made great somethings—great men, great saints, great lovers—if it came to the worst great criminals. Had she, Louie, been that jaunty young man in the red waistcoat, she would have chosen for a rival and enemy anybody she had ever seen rather than this needy, gigantic Mr. Jeffries, who made this barefaced attempt to throw dust into people's eyes by means of apocryphal women he was "after" elsewhere.
And he helped this youngster he must hate with hisstudies—cadged on his probably-to-be-successful rival for a bath.
He was masked too, then.
Yes, at this dingy School in Holborn Louie had found something even more interesting than amusement.
IV
§a
Louie had not yet allowed herself much time for fear of what was to happen to herself physically; she had amused herself too heartily. She bought chocolates and hated the smell of tobacco; and so far that was all. What hung over her was as inevitable as Death, and for that reason was, like Death, to be kept at arm's-length as long as possible.
But she had already seen enough of Richenda's sister to be aware that in all probability her stay in Sutherland Place would not be a long one. Mrs. Leggat was formally kind, to Lord Moone's niece rather than to herself; but for the rest an armed neutrality seemed to exist between the two women. The Leggats were childless, and for that reason the less likely to be charitable. Louie had, in fact, found the social layer that is bounded on the one hand by the wickedness of pugilists and on the other by the scapes of young gentlemen about to enter the army. Within these limits Virtue reigned—not always harshly, always consciously. Not the wives of the Cæsars (it seemed to Louie) were above suspicion, but the Mrs. Leggats; not the saints, who confessed that they were tempted, but the Westons, who did not know of temptation's existence. Itwas as if some unseen, august Mrs. Lovenant-Smith had decreed that landladies and teachers in business schools did not do these things. And they did not.
Louie went to the house of Richenda's father, the bookseller—once. She had no wish to go again. As Richenda had described him there had been something tragic about him; to Louie he had appeared merely as a grey-bearded, rheumatic, complaining old man, a picture of pathos without dignity. And those six other Richendas, of various ages, struck her as horribly superfluous. She wanted Life's colour, not its greyness; she greatly preferred the garnish, incredible Mackie.
The weeks passed. Weston came regularly on Sunday mornings, and on Sunday afternoons she took long walks. On the nights when there was no class she rode on buses, along Oxford Street, down Regent Street to the Circus, and back by Park Lane to the Marble Arch and Notting Hill Gate again; or sometimes she went Paddington way, up the Harrow Road and out and back through Kilburn. She began to know something of the streets of London. Her health was far better in London than it had been at Rainham Parva. It was perfect. She still feared nothing.
The Christmas Examinations drew within sight, and hand in hand with the preparation for them another and a more lightsome preoccupation engaged the School. This was the Christmas Social with which the last term of the year always closed. An Executive had been formed; on it Louie's name appeared; and it met frequently at the close of afternoon school. One of the younger students was sent across to the teashop over the way for scones and cake; akettle was set on the general-room fire; and the social was discussed over tea.
Mr. Mackie was the life and soul of these meetings. He was especially strong on the subject of whether evening-dress was to be obligatory, permissible or debarred. He declared himself at one of the earlier meetings as out and out for fancy dress, but was outvoted.
"See me as a Woodbine, girls, beg pardon, miss-cue, a Columbine, I mean, nearly cold with the kilt, kilt with the cold, I should say, sixpence in the box for the opera-glasses, Gerald, but don't ogle me while mother's in the wings, wishing she was twenty-one again—good old mother—
"'Here's to the happiest hours of my life,Spent in the arms of another man's wife—My Mo-the-rr!'"
"'Here's to the happiest hours of my life,Spent in the arms of another man's wife—My Mo-the-rr!'"
(The shake on the long note produced by a rapid play of Mr. Mackie's fingers on Mr. Mackie's Adam's apple.) "Thought I'd have to backpedal, didn't you, Miss Causton? Nay, fear not, fair damsel, the intentions of Ferdinando are honourable, as long as you watch him, pip-pip, phee-ooo!" (The shrill whistle behind the handkerchief closed the strophe.)
But this was rushing matters. Kitty Windus spoke, no doubt on behalf of the students who hadn't a pound a week on their own.
"Fancy dress would keep a good many away," she said. "I should love it, but it really is an expense, you know."
"Weston can buy a penny bottle of gum and come as a foreign stamp."
"Do be serious, Mr. Mackie, now! We want the social to be for everybody here——"
"Andtheir friends," Miss Levey interpolated, with a look of private understanding at Kitty Windus. There was a short interlude between the two women.
"Youwon'tfind out, Miriam!"
"Ivill!"
"Did you offer him tickets for the Holborn?"
"Yes; but he vouldn't buy them."
"Doesn't Mrs. J. as-is-to-be dance?"
"I don't know. He vouldn't buy the tickets."
"I'll bet you another half-crown you don't get him there, let alone her!"
"Done vith you, Kitty Vindus!" cried Miss Levey excitedly.
Here Mr. Mackie interposed. "Who's that? Jeffries? He can come in his ulster as Boaz—heu, how Ruthless! (Beshrew me, but have I not a pretty wit?)"
"He's got that new brown suit to come in—or did he get it second-hand, Archie?" asked Kitty.
"New," quoth Archie authoritatively. "Allworthy's, in Cheapside. Two ten."
"I nearly died when he turned up without that old ulster!"
"Vasn't it screaming?" simpered Miss Levey. "No, don't, Archie!" (Young Merridew was pulling out the frill of her jabot.)
"Do tell us exactly what he said when you congratulated him on his engagement, Evie!" said Kitty Windus, turning to Evie Soames.
The girl coloured a little. In common fairness Louie had to acquit her of full participation in the joke of Mr. Jeffries and his unknownfiancée. Louie had learned that it had been in order to congratulate Mr. Jeffries on thissupposed engagement that she had followed Mr. Jeffries into the library on that Friday evening before her departure for the week-end to Guildford. She thought little more of her on that account. In being too ready with apologies and congratulations Evie Soames merely showed the vulgarity of the rest of the place.
"No, do let's get on with business," Kitty Windus broke in. "I vote for ordinary dress."
"Yes, ordinary dress," came the chorus.
"Vith vite gloves, of course," said Miss Levey.
"Of course."
"Vot do you say, Miss Causton?"
"White gloves, of course," said Louie, with her demurest look. "And flowers in their buttonholes."
"Some gentlemen don't like to vear flowers," said Miriam Levey suspiciously.
"Aha, doesn't he?" from Mr. Mackie. "Isaw you at the Holborn, Miss Levey—naughty, naughty——"
"Oh, I don't mean very big ones," said Louie, sipping her tea.
And the discussion went on, and meeting followed meeting; but the examination was to take place before the social.
The only fear Louie had for her Elementary was whether it would be worth very much when she had got it. She supposed that as an earnest preparation for the struggle of life this place was not quite such a fraud as Chesson's, but that struggle could hardly be as fierce as Richenda Earle had said if this Elementary took her very far. Indeed she had wondered more than once lately, especially since she had ceased to amuse herself quite so desperately, whether it was likely that typewriting and book-keepingwere to be her destiny after all. She supposed they were, but she couldn't quite realise it. But she was fully prepared, and hoped Mr. Jeffries was as sure of his Honours paper as she was of her simple Pass.
For she had gathered that success in the coming examination was of importance to Mr. Jeffries. She did not know the nature of his studies; later she surmised that those had been only loosely linked to the ordinary school curriculum, and that while for his Certificate's sake he must acquire all that text-books could tell him, his real broodings had been over matters that are antecedent to text-books. That was probably the difference between him and Mr. Weston. Mr. Weston was said to be clever, but his cleverness ended at the point where real inquiry began. More than this Louie did not know. You cannot, after all, ask the pioneer what he goes forth for to see. He goes forth to see whatever there may be to be seen.
The weeks that had intervened since that evening when Louie had seen that wonderful radiance of his face had done nothing to alter her conviction that if there was a dark horse in that Holborn stable at all the name of that horse was Mr. Jeffries.
As it happened, Mr. Jeffries was almost the first person she encountered when, on the Friday morning of the examination, she entered the School at half-past ten. He wore the new brown suit that had been remarked on at the meetings of the Executive of the social, and he was looking with curiosity about him. They had made quite extensive preparations for the examination. The whole place had been divided into compartments with hired yellow-painted screens, and screens also barricaded theEof reference-books near the bay window of the general-room. Newpens and new blotting-paper lay on the desks, and the little porcelain inkwells had been newly filled. Then it occurred to Louie that it was more than likely that Mr. Jeffries had never been in the place in the daytime before. He must have got the day off from that "somewhere in the City" that Kitty Windus had said sounded so prosperous. His tawny hair was as flat and silky as ever, and his chin as cleanly shaved. He passed her with a curt bow and continued his inspection of the place. The candidates stood talking in groups, waiting for eleven o'clock.
"Have you discovered your—er—appointed place, Miss Causton?" said Weston, coming up to Louie. "Good, good! I must now take my departure. Members of the Staff are not permitted to remain on the premises during the hours devoted to the examination. I wish you—er—good luck."
He seemed to change his mind about saying "a happy issue from all your afflictions."
By eleven o'clock Louie was seated in her little screen-enclosed compartment. A sort of hired mourner read a formal caution to the candidates. She noticed that it lacked thelargior etherof the third person indicative, being, indeed, in the second person imperative; and then she drew her paper to her.
Quiet fell on the examination-rooms.
She found her papers no more difficult than she had anticipated. On one point only, a matter of indenting in actual practice, was she a little in doubt, and a minute in the old ledger-room at lunch-time would tell her whether her answer had been right or wrong. She read over again what she had written; it seemed, with the possible exception of that single point, all right; and she tilted her chair,put her hands behind her head, and leaned back. The candidates had been warned that they must bring lunch with them. It was half-an-hour from lunch-time yet.
Her place was by the folding door of the general-room. From it she could see nothing save the stationery cupboard on her left, and, beyond it, the next screen-enclosed compartment. She was wondering who was in it when a foot moved beneath the yellow screen. It was the foot of Mr. Jeffries. Louie hoped that he was getting on well, and then dismissed him from her thoughts. She began to wonder about the practical usefulness of the examination again.
Doubtless it was well enough in its way, but less than ever could she persuade herself that this kind of thing was to be her destiny. There were too many other likelihoods—not to speak of the one certainly so huge that she had sometimes been actually in danger of leaving it out of the account altogether. Idly she counted them. First, there was the certainty.... Next, she would probably be leaving Sutherland Place soon, to go—where? She did not know. At the price of submission to Uncle Augustus she could go back home; or Chaff would have her looked after; but both these courses were rather out of the question. They were out of the question because lately something else had been more and more in her thoughts—her unknown father. That father might, for all she knew, be the bugbear her mother had always made him out to be; but on the other hand he might not. She knew her mother, and the more she thought of it the more she gave her father the benefit of an increasing number of doubts. Until she should have seen him it was now no more than fair that she should do so. Moreover, she could see himat any time without his being any the wiser of the—inspection. Chaff knew where he was; Chaff, who was always fetching or taking her somewhere, would take her there also. She was resolved to go sooner or later, and later might be—who knew?—too late.
For at last she had admitted a dread.
In any case, her destiny was quite as likely to be determined by a visit to that public-house up the Thames as by writing, in this stuffy Holborn third floor, answers to ridiculous questions aboutpro formainvoices and bills of lading.
She was still turning these things over in her mind when the bell rang for the close of the first part of the examination.
She ate her lunch in the company of Kitty Windus and Miss Levey, and then the three women passed out on to the staircase and sat down half-way down the stairs. But the men had flocked to the staircase for their noxious smoking, and Louie re-entered the general-room again. Then she remembered the doubtful point in her paper and walked to the library. She passed through it into the old ledger-room. Any old ledger would settle the point on which she was not quite sure.
The room was almost dark, but Louie knew where the musty old books were. She put out her hand to the nearest of them. But suddenly she withdrew her hand. The high window that gave on the head of the stairs afforded no more than a glimmer of light, but Louie thought she had seen something move. She peered into the twilight, "Is anybody there?" she said, but she had no answer.
But the room was occupied. The next moment she had seen and fled.
Her irregular lips were pursed as she came out into the light again. There was a confusion, too, in her eyes, probably as much as there had been in the eyes of the two she had come upon in there. They must have seen her come in, and have realised that their only chance of escaping detection lay in keeping perfectly still.
Polly Ross, cheek to cheek with that horrid little bounder!
There was no question now of whom the girl preferred.
Louie, wondering what right she had to do so, felt nevertheless a little sick.
But the next moment her fastidiousness had vanished. The door that led to the stairs had opened; Mr. Mackie's voice sounded loud for a moment on the landing; and then Mr. Jeffries lurched in, stumbled, and almost ran to his compartment between the yellow screens.
How he too knew what was going on in the old ledger-room, Louie could not guess; but she knew that he did know.
She walked slowly to her own place and sat down.
A few minutes later the bell for the second half of the examination rang, and a new paper was put before Louie. But she neither glanced at it nor yet heard the voice of the hired mourner repeating his caution. She sat with her chin in her hands, looking straight before her. She was wondering what was taking place behind the yellow screen beyond the stationery cupboard. Amusement was hardly the word for that.
For she had seen Mr. Jeffries' face as he had stumbled in. She sought words for the expression that had been upon it. Lost—despairing—devilish——
There was not much doubt about whohewas in love with either.
Devilish, despairing, lost——
"Poor—soul!" she thought compassionately....
She wondered why she should be so unaccountably nervous. She was nervous. She even jumped a little when somebody on the other side of the folding door allowed a pen to fall to the floor. She could see the feet beneath the lower edge of the screen in front of her; they did not move; the examination quietness had fallen on the place again, and the very quietness grew on her. Strong drama, if not tragedy outright, was being enacted behind those half-inch yellow boards beyond the stationery cupboard, but the quietness continued. It was such a quietness as she had read of in tales when, somebody's ears being sharpened for an expected scream, their eyes had not at first noticed the little dark rivulet of blood trickling slowly across the floor. Involuntarily her eyes went to the yellow screen.
But rubbish; this was morbid.
Morbid or not, however, her lips almost shaped the words, slowly and deliberately: that boy with the red waistcoat would do well to be careful. He would do especially well to be careful if, after this, after the glare on the other's face, he should still have help offered him with his studies or be asked for a bath. For something would happen then. Eggshells such as he did not come into collision with bronze without something happening. And if anything not easily to be accounted for did happen to that odious little whippersnapper, nothing would ever persuade Louie that she did not know a likely quarter in which to look for the reason.
Blind, devilish despair!
And all for an empty-headed little thing who could have been found in her dozens behind twenty shop counters not a quarter of a mile away! What on earth, what on, or under, or above the earth, could this brooding, clever, gigantic, laughed-at creature want with such a doll? Why could he not leave her in her proper place—cheek by cheek with the little bounder of her choice in that smelly, unlighted old ledger-room? The man must be blind, or a fool.
Then a sort of lethargy took Louie. Suddenly she cared for nothing. Let the fancy-stationer's cub take his risks; let the other eat his heart out if he would; it was no business of hers. Nor was that absurd table of questions before her any business of hers. Kitty Windus might answer that sort of thing; Mackie might answer it; but the Scarisbricks were not Kittys, with her "part-independency," not Mackies, to stuff their heads and ink their fingers like this for their "permanencies." She did not know now why she had ever come to the place, and she wanted no more of it. What she was going to do she did not know. She did know, however, that she was not going to answer that silly paper.
So, by-and-by, she allowed the paper to be collected again, as blank as when it had been placed before her.
She came upon the perverse Mr. Jeffries once more before she left. He almost ran her down bodily as they met in the doorway of the typewriting-room. But this time she did not look at his face. With a swift intaking of her breath she fell back to save herself. She did not hear whether he apologised or not; in one moment, withoutpremeditation, her whole being had become constrained to a new, protective, instinctive attitude.
Slowly and thoughtfully she left the School.
She alone of the students was unsurprised to hear, four or five days later, that Mr. Jeffries, who had passed with distinction in the first part of his paper, had, like herself, failed in the second part.
§b
For the examination the rooms had been cut up with screens; for the breaking-up social they were cleared of everything that could be stowed away into dark corners. Never was such a hoisting and calling as those with which the hired piano was got up the three flights of stairs. Most of it came from Mr. Mackie, turned for the nonce into a shabash-wallah.
"Mind her funnybone—all together—up with her! Oh, pursue me, wenches, I've got my muscle up, first time since the second housemaid ran away with the dustman! Don't tickle her parson's nose, Archi-bald, or she'll sneeze when I sing, key in the usual place—and mind the stair above the top, it isn't there. This way—excuse my shirt-sleeves, Miss Windus, I'm in mourning."
And so the piano was trundled to its place in the corner by the big blackboard.
Mr. Mackie was of service, too, in the French-chalking of the floor, for the men hauled him about by the arms and legs on a piece of sacking in order to give it its final polish for dancing. Half the students, male and female, helped to wind the blackened old brackets and chandeliers with red and green tissue paper, to set evergreens on the topsof the cupboards, and to affix the trophies of little Christmas tree flags on the cabbagey old walls; and Louie helped with the refreshments. Three women had been got in, one to make coffee and the others to preside in the cloakrooms, and Miss Levey had won half-a-crown from Kitty Windus.
For Mr. Jeffries was coming to the party after all. More, it had been Louie herself who had asked him, though it had been Miss Levey's cunning that had made her do so. On no grounds at all save that it appeared to annoy, the Jewess had once or twice twitted Louie that Mr. Jeffries favouredherand, when Mr. Jeffries had declined her own invitation, had nudged Louie. "Youask him, and see whether he doesn't come!" the nudge had meant. Louie entered into no contest with Miss Levey. She had turned at once to Mr. Jeffries and repeated the invitation. He had accepted it.
Louie doubted her own wisdom in going to that social at all. Even when she had reached Sutherland Place and spread out her frocks on her bed she still doubted. But suddenly she gave a short laugh. Of course she was going! It was her first "social," and it might be her last; she was going, and she was going to wear the oyster-grey satin that, ever since she had had it, had always seemed to "live" so on her shoulders.
She declined Mrs. Leggat's help in getting into it; if Mrs. Leggat would be so good as to get her a hansom instead——Mrs. Leggat went out. The oyster-grey was one of the oldest of her frocks; Louie knew every stitch of it; and she smiled as she thought that for that very reason she would have chosen it had she deliberately intendedto make a conquest. She surveyed herself in it in the tilted glass. Yes, she thought she would do.
"It's your last time on, poor old rag," she muttered.
She heard the pulling up of the hansom; she put on a light shawl and descended; and Mrs. Leggat lingered in the doorway as she drove off.
They had set candles on the floors of the landings of the Holborn stairs, but they guttered in the draughts, and showed little but the feet of those who ascended. Louie followed a pair of orange silk-stockinged ankles and a trammel of orange petticoats (she didn't know whose) up the stairs, and entered the general-room. The library had been converted into a ladies' cloakroom, with the old ledger-room as an annexe; and in this last room Evie Soames, with an elaborate running of pink ribbons beneath the openwork of her cream net blouse, was putting on her slippers. She only showed Louie the top of her dark head; in this and other ways she had displayed reserve since the lunch interval of the examination day. A woman with a pair of very chapped hands and a very clean apron took Louie's shawl; and Louie, first glancing at her hair over the powdered shoulders of the person in orange, went into the double room that had been prepared for dancing.
Students and their friends had turned up in their best bibs and tuckers. Most of the men wore swallow-tailed coats; one of the exceptions was Mr. Jeffries in his brown jacket-suit. He was talking to Miss Levey, or rather Miss Levey was gasping to him; she had just given him, or rather hung upon his wrist, one of the violet-written cards, printed from the gelatine-copier, which served as programmes.Weston wore a tightly fitting old frock-coat, which Mr. Mackie humorously likened to the overcoat of sausage that had spent the night in the coal-hole. Archie Merridew had a white waistcoat. All the men stroked the wrinkles out of their white gloves without ceasing. The women, to the reflective eye, had lost little by the foregoing of out-and-out evening-dress. There was an "I could an' if I would" about their long sleeves and high necks. Kitty Windus, in her blue foulard, with a cutlet-frill about her thin neck, graciously consented to the level of those who had not a pound a week on their own; Miriam Levey, in a maroon pinafore-frock with broad braces over her shoulders, instantly put every simple blouse in the room at its ease. One frock only flouted the modest agreement to which the executive had come; this was the orange satin one which Louie had followed upstairs. It partially clothed a friend of Mr. Mackie's. Louie heard the words in which Mr. Mackie introduced young Merridew to its wearer.
"Mr. Merridew, Miss Dulcie Levine, Miss Levine, Mr. Merridew, two of the best, seasonable weather for the time of the year, ain't it, what? Permit me, Dulcibella, a bit of fluff" (here Mr. Mackie cast aside the bit of fluff, if there was one, which he had taken from Miss Dulcie's shoulder, and represented the noise of its falling by a loud stamp on the floor). "Ought to be dancing soon; what time is it by your clocks, Dulcie?Isaw them as you got out of the Black Maria, the cab, I mean—heu, desist, Mr. Mackie, you wag!" (Mr. Mackie smacked his own wrist in reproof of himself.) "Why am I not in me usual spirits, gin cold, to-night, Dulcinea? 'Tis thy fatal beauty has undone me; what ho, a needle and threat, O fairest ofthy socks, sex I should say.... Ay, she dances, Archibald, but not with thee, base varlet; she dances at the Theatre hight Alcazar, nigh unto ye Square called Leicester."
Louie heard Kitty Windus whisper to Evie Soames that Mr. Mackie was going to be splendid to-night; but her approval did not extend to Mr. Mackie's friend, who was already too splendid. Kitty's head was held so high when Miss Levine passed that she appeared to be looking at her with her nostrils. With her eyes she saw only the orange creature's back. This was a rather handsomeV, and that did not improve matters. Kitty whispered behind her fan about "some people." Miss Dulcie used Kitty as a quizzing-glass for the inspection of whoever happened to be behind her.
Mr. Jeffries stood with his back against the thrown-back folding door. He did not dance, but he had not at all the air of a wet blanket; on the contrary, his face wore a quite lively smile. He was smiling at the red and green tissue paper that enswathed the central chandelier. Louie saw Evie Soames pass him; his eyes rested on her for a moment, but only as they rested on everybody else, and then went back to the red and green tissue paper of the chandelier again. He had accepted the inevitable, then. Indeed, had he not done so, Louie could hardly imagine that he would have been there. Well, it was the most sensible thing he could do. Louie would go and speak to him presently.
Louie made a tour of the rooms. TheEof reference-books had been turned into a place for sitting out, and in the typewriting-room the lids of two or three desks had been wedged up to form card-tables. Into the room beyond,which was the smoking-room, she did not penetrate. Already a fiddle was tuning up, but Louie had told young Merridew, who had magnanimously asked her for her card, that she did not intend to dance. None the less he had taken her card and scrawled something on it. She had tossed the piece of violet-written pasteboard into a corner.
At nine o'clock there was a tapping on the top of the piano, and the music began. Mr. Mackie and the lady in orange glided out over the French-chalked floor. Two minutes later the room was full of waltzing couples.
Louie had sat down on the opposite side of the room to Mr. Jeffries. Through momentarily clear spaces she saw him from time to time. He did not move from his station by the folding door, where, among the hoppers and caperers who sped past him, he seemed to have something of the stability of a monument in some centre of apparently aimless traffic. Still, he seemed to be enjoying himself, and Louie intended to go across to him when the waltz was over.
A word she overheard, however, caused her to change her mind and to rise to her feet at once. Mr. Mackie, passing with his orange partner, had repeated his jape about the Ruthless Boaz.
Without more ado Louie threaded her way through the dancers and stood before Mr. Jeffries.
"Won't you try to dance?" she said.
As he turned the amber eyes on her she had the feeling that she slid all at once into the field of some piece of apparatus with an object-glass. She was the object. For a moment he forgot his smile; he looked attentively at her; and then the smile returned. He answered in an easy,deep voice, the accent of which was neither Cockney nor yet quite of the mode of the men Louie knew.
"Oh, I—I don't dance," he said.
"Won't you let me teach you?"
His eyes were still on hers. He seemed to give the simple question weighty consideration. Then his eyes dropped to his hands.
"Hallo," he said, as if to himself. His programme was where Miss Levey had put it, dangling from his wrist as if from a hook. Apparently he had not noticed it before. Then, looking at Louie again, he said: "I mean, my gloves—I've no gloves."
"Gloves!" she said quietly. "Come."
She took the absurd programme from his wrist, threw it away, and put her gloved hand into his naked one.
She drew Mr. Jeffries into the current.
Louie had danced with ignoramuses before, but never with a man quite so awkward as this. She did her best to steer him, but before they had gone half-way round the room they had collided with Evie Soames, leaning back in the crook of young Merridew's arm—with Kitty Windus, tiptoe and leaning forward over her partner—with Mr. Mackie, who had lighted a cigarette and was singing the refrain of the dance as he passed. Then Mr. Jeffries begged her, out of consideration for herself, to stop. But she had no desire to stop. She wondered why, bumped and trampled so, she should want to go on, but she gave that riddle up. He did not cease to apologise for his ungainliness.
But the riddle of why she did not wish to stop refused to be given up. It renewed itself with each of his apologies. Stumbling ludicrously, she knew that she stillwished to go on. What she did not know at that time of her life was that she had secrets that hitherto she had kept even from herself.
Then, all in a moment, the strange thing happened. She felt that colour, that stress and anger never brought there, rise slow and warm into her cheeks. Her glance had merely rested for a moment on that hand of hers that lay slender as a willow leaf in his, but the riddle was a puzzle no longer. Abashed, shehadsurprised a secret.
She had caught herself wishing—half wishing—she did not quite know what—that she too had taken off her glove.
Her colour lasted for half-a-minute; then, perhaps because of the colour, her voice became matter-of-fact. She glanced up at him.
"I'm sorry you failed in your examination," she said.
Louie was tall, but his head was clear and away above hers. He looked down, earnest, anxious, smiling, all three.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "Why should it?" he added.
Louie had thought that it had mattered a great deal, but she was still a little bewildered. Even out of the answer to the riddle another seemed to have sprung already. She laughed a little.
"Oh—only that one doesn't like to be beaten," she said.
This too he seemed to give profound yet (if such a thing may be) absentminded attention.
"Is anybody ever beaten?" he asked slowly. "I mean, unless they deserve to be?"
Archie and Evie Soames had just overtaken them again, laughing together, as, hand in hand, they took a runningglide towards the door. His remark came oddly from a doubly beaten man. What then did he call a beating?... She looked covertly at the two hands again.
"But—mayn't circumstances be too strong for you?"
This again he considered. "Circumstances are strong," he admitted. "But then, if one's a fool, so are a good many other people. There's always that chance, you see."
He spoke as gently as if he had been speaking to a child, but Louie suddenly found herself wondering whether he had accepted the inevitable after all. This hardly sounded like it. She spoke quietly.
"Nobody thinks you're a fool just because you failed—at least I don't."
"Failed?" he repeated, as if puzzled.... "Oh, you mean the examination! Of course I ought never to have gone in for it. (Oh dear, another bump—I'm afraid you find me hopeless.)"
"Not have gone in for it? Why?"
The lion's eyes looked at her in surprise.
"Why? Why, because I failed." He seemed to consider it an entirely conclusive answer.
"But you'll surely try again?" said Louie.
"Eh? 'Try,' did you say?... Oh, the men who have to try are no good. For that matter it's always the duffers who try the hardest. I admit they pull it off, but then things are arranged so that the duffers can pull them off—have to be, I suppose. But the men who aren't duffers——"
He stopped suddenly.
"What?" she said.
But once more she had the feeling that she had onlyjust swum into the field of his vision. It was singularly disconcerting. His smile, which had disappeared, appeared again. He seemed to remember that he was at a dance.
"I suppose you're coming back after Christmas?" he said.
It was not very likely, but she said: "Very likely. You were saying, about the men who aren't duffers——"
Again he got her focus. "Was I? Well, there aren't so many of them that we need bother about them. So you are coming back?"
Louie found him extraordinary, unclassifiable. She could not say that his answers were not ready; they were instant to the point; but somehow they weren't answers. Of course, theywereanswers if you liked, but they seemed in some way to be private communings as well. She wondered whether he was in the habit of talking much to himself; he spoke rather as if he was—as if, his consciousness of her presence notwithstanding, he considered himself to be as good as alone now.
Louie had heard the expression "second self"—well, this, "second self" or not, was certainly a curious accord. And then he allowed that deliberate, altogether discordant smile (that might just as well have been hooked round his ears like a false beard) to come between, and asked her if she was coming back after Christmas!
Then—this came suddenly—she knew for a certainty what hitherto had hung in doubt—that she would not be coming back after Christmas. She must sit down. Of course, it was to have been expected. She had been unwise to dance.
She spoke faintly. "Please take me to a seat."
Quite automatically he did so. He led her to theEof reference-books. The waltz closed. So did Louie's eyes.
"Please leave me alone for a few minutes," she murmured.
He bowed, and retired as automatically as he had come.
In a few minutes she felt better, but she still sat in the little book-lined recess. Her eyes remained closed, but not now altogether from faintness. She heard Mr. Mackie's voice, apparently a long way off, shouting, "Come on—let's get the ice broken!" and partners were being chosen for the Shop-Girl Lancers. More minutes passed. Louie, her eyes still closed, had begun once more to think of that secret she had surprised within herself.
She doubted herself profoundly now. For all she now knew her nature might contain other such secrets as this that had sent the warm blood into her cheeks at a touch—nay, at the thought of a touch. She might have, so to speak, a basic, unsuspected layer of them, needing only to be stirred to provide surprise after surprise. Those surprises might make all she had hitherto known—all—seem stupid and flat and commonplace. If so, why must the discovery come now? Secrets from herself—now? Impossible!
But, as if limned on her closed lids, she saw the two hands again, her own like a lanceolate leaf, lying within that great masculine engine of his.
And all at once she felt unutterably lonely.
It was some time before she opened her eyes again. By that time Mr. Mackie had succeeded in breaking the ice. The floor shook to the fourth figure of the Shop-Girl Lancers, and Louie saw, beyond the reference-books, theAlcazar beauty swung clear off the ground, a goldfish whirling almost horizontally past. Miss Levey's skirts followed, their owner crying, "Help, help!"... "For it ain't the proper way to treat a la-ady!" Mr. Mackie's jubilant voice sang—and when the figure ended there were shouts and clapping of hands and uproarious cries of "Again, again!"
By-and-by Louie rose. She walked up the room again. At the piano Mr. Mackie, who was to sing, was now confidentially humming the air of his song into the hired pianist's ear. Mr. Jeffries, once more looking as if he needed a niche and a plinth, was standing in his original place, by the folding door. Miss Levine and Archie Merridew were half hidden behind the piano; and Kitty Windus, radiant, was openly flirting with the pale student called Richardson. Evie Soames had just spoken to Mr. Jeffries; she was sulking at Archie's desertion of her. Then Mr. Weston announced, solemnly and distinctly, that Mr. Mackie was about to add to the enjoyment of all present by singing a song entitled "That Gorgonzola Cheese." Applause greeted the announcement, and Mr. Mackie, who had slipped behind the piano for a moment and returned with his coat on the wrong side out, began.
Louie found herself once more by the side of Mr. Jeffries.
"I should like some coffee," she said.
The coffee was in an adjoining room. For the first time since she had been at the School Louie did not want to hear Mr. Mackie.
But the hint was lost on Mr. Jeffries.
"Eh? Certainly," he said, and went away in search of the coffee.