Chapter II: Part I: Holborn (2)

And, looking back now, I wonder how much superstition there was in it that I wanted all the changes I was planning to come at once. For I meant that the break, when it did come, should be clean and final. As long as I remained with Rixon Tebb & Masters' my wretched single room at King's Cross was quite good enough for an agency clerk; when I left Rixon Tebb & Masters' I would leave those quarters also. Until then, I don't think you could have dragged me out, so strongly had I this feeling. Superstition or what you like, it had, for me, the force of a large and wise, if not yet fully worked out strategy. They tried, of course, at the Business College in Holborn, just as they are now trying at the new place in Kingsway, to teach us this larger generalship of waiting, withholding, massing, concentration, and then the swift development and advance; but I don't think it was much good. You don't get these things in return for so many guineas a year in fees. But I felt their stirrings then.... I hope I have made it plain that neither at the place in Kingsway, nor in my sordid lodgings over the public-house, nor under the arches of Somers Town that night, was I wasting my time.

And now, like a match to all that I had prepared and was preparing, had come the kindling thought of Evie Soames.

I remember I walked to Hampstead that night, revolving it all. Walking always steadies me, and by the time I had reached the Lower Heath the mechanical calculators at the new place in Kingsway do not work more coldly and mathematically than my brain had begun to work. The advantages I possessed, which had been the first thing to rush into my head, I allowed for the present to take care of themselves; I now envisaged my disadvantages.

You may imagine that these were terrifying.... I counted them, and was unable to check my groans when, thinking I had come to the end of them, yet another sprang up, stabbing me as it were from behind. They might almost have been veritable assassins, springing out from behind the dark bushes and copses near the Vale of Health among which I wandered.... Think of them! Think of them!

They, he and she, were of an age, or nearly; I seven years the senior of the elder of them. They met on three days a week at the college, met doubtless to snigger together over their "fun," only on three evenings could I see her. Her people apparently knew his; she would go down to Guildford, and my fancy might picture them, together there, taking walks, telling stories over the fire, laughing at chance resemblances at the Zoo. And all this time I should not cease for a moment to labour at that garden of my ambition above the brown mould of which not a green shoot yet showed. How (you must remember I was desperately facing the worst that could happen and not the best)--how could they help but fall in love? What would it be possible for me to do but to discover the thing after it had happened? And when it had happened, what was there then to be done?

But I need not force all this upon you. You will see for yourself. Look at it, then, and tell me where you would have conceived the odds to lie--with my possibly large-planning but certainly slow-executing brain, or with them and their opportunities and luck and gifts of circumstance and nature, demolishable singly perhaps, but well-nigh invincible in the sum of them?

I weighed it as I strayed and stubbled about the benighted Heath.

I returned from Hampstead at three o'clock in the morning. My horror of red and green had long since been switched off, and I got into bed during the only quiet interval that noisy and populous corner ever knew. I had now balanced advantages and disadvantages together, and was recapitulating the whole. Examining, setting aside, bringing forward again to re-examine in other aspects, setting aside again, checking, dismissing, estimating--my brain worked like a ticking instrument. Clocks struck, but still I pondered; and I was as free from anger now as if it had been another, not I, who had sought the support of the railings in Mecklenburgh Square.

And there dominated all my machination the single thought, that by no slip or carelessness or overlooked detail must they be made aware that I was watching them as a masked thief watches the uneasy sleeper upon the bed.

V

It was at Rixon Tebb & Masters' that I first began to know jealousy, or at least the image of it. I find I must say a little more about this place in which I spent my days at that time.

I have said that Polwhele hated me; but nobody loved anybody else at Rixon Tebb & Masters'. I have worked in offices that have been not bad fun at all; offices where the fellows formed a sort of family, as they did afterwards at the Freight & Ballast Company, with something not unlike the family bond, the family jokes, and an interchange each morning of the adventures of the night before not unlike the exchange of items of news from letters about a family breakfast-table; but there was nothing like that at Rixon Tebb & Masters'. There, one of us could scarcely glance up over the little brass rail at his desk-head without seeing, across the spaces where the green porcelain cones of the incandescents hung, another furtive pair of eyes meeting his own and looking almost guiltily away again. If the partners despised us for our cringing before them they were right; we were a despicable set. I don't think a friendship was ever struck up in the place. We hated, if for no other reason, than because each of us knew his neighbour to be as contemptible as he knew himself to be.

It was in this atmosphere that I wrapped myself about with the thought of Evie Soames. My routine work taxed my attention little; I could do it as well as it needed to be done and live a whole free inner life at the same time; and I was sometimes actually startled when, looking up after some lapse and interim in which I had seen nothing but the shape of Evie's birch-like neck and the brilliant motion of her eyes, I saw the crafty gaze of a fellow-clerk on my face. Once I met Sutt's eyes in this way; I knew his thought, namely, that he surmised the nature of mine; and he smiled, a mean sort of smile. He didn't smile twice, though, while I was there. I don't mean that I said or did anything, but I think he knew what my look meant.... All the same there got about the office--or rather about the corners and lavatories and behind screens, for it never came nearer to me than that--the only joke I remember ever to have been born there--the joke that Jeffries had all the appearance of a man in love. I took the hint. Thenceforward, as far as I might, I did not allow the faintest flicker of an emotion to cross my face. And more than ever was I on my guard lest I should do so in a place where it would have mattered more than it did at Rixon Tebb & Masters'.

Then, long before I knew of any valid grounds for them, and before a brain less prospectively active than mine would as much as dreamed of them, came these jealousies. Perhaps, like my occasional angers and like that secret fragrant flame of my love, they were emotions at large, unattached to any person but bound sooner or later to become so attached, and already seeking a quarter in which to alight.

They wrung my heart. Hot flushes and rages sometimes came upon me with no warning whatever. Sometimes in the middle of a column of figures or a twelve-inch-high stack of addresses, a devil would slyly lift its head--the thought that while I sat there polishing my trousers on a tall stool and the wrist of my sleeve on my desk, he and my Evie were--where?... I have in a remarkable degree that most precious and most hideous of gifts, the gift of mental visualisation, at these times it would have its way with me. I would see them in those moments where I would and engaged how I would. Well nigh as clearly as I see the page before me, I would see him, long boyish head and fair curly hair, red waistcoat and cigarette, and turned-up trousers and all, now making pretexts that something was wrong with her typewriter, now carrying a specimen ledger for her, now choosing for himself a place from which he could watch her, or even passing on to her the explanations of knots and difficulties he had had the previous evening from myself. My fancy (my reason at these times its helpless slave) would dog them--past the general room into the lecture-room--thence to the back room where the charts and apparatus were kept--thence back again through the lecture room into the shorthand and typewriting and senior class rooms, and so throughout every corner behind our three Holborn bow windows. There were times when I used all my powers of concentration to see one of them without the other, and failed.... And then the fit would pass and my steady reason would reassert itself. I would tell myself I was a fool to thrust knives into myself thus. She was merely that touchingly opening fair young tree; and as for him, if his young male swaggerings in the pride of his twenty-two years included any knowledge of girls at all, they were probably girls of a very different class from hers.

Then would come the other damnable series again, and the sweat would stand on my brow.

No wonder Sutt looked.

Yet I am not sure that, for the sake of certain purely heavenly hours, I would not go through it all again. Would you suppose that in that five-shilling room of mine, where I had to flatten myself against the wall before I could take my clothes off unseen--or as I dined on sausage and mashed at my reeking "pull-up"--or as I roamed the pavements in search of the physical exhaustion that should bring sleep--would you suppose that in these places and living this life I could have heavenly hours? Ah, but I could, and had!... I don't want you to think I am sentimentalising about it. The public-house downstairs had knocked a good many ideas about the sanctity of our common humanity out of my head. I never, in my fourpenny dining-place, looked at the drayman or porter at the next table and wondered whether he also knew the heights and abysses I knew. Doubtless he had or had had his own, but all is _not_ comparative. There _are_ grades in heaven and hell. I knew I stood out, exceptional, destined, marked for signal honour or for signal dishonour. I had no desire to persuade anybody else of this. These things are beyond proof. Attempt to prove them and you but prove their opposites.

And so literally was this slender dark creature "my life," that often at the college itself my resolution all but failed me. More (but not much more) woman than child, she seemed at these times--what shall I say?--not a wonder shrunk, but a receptacle strangely slight and tender for the mighty things preparing for her. At such moments I found myself looking years ahead--seeing many things over and behind us, and myself, perhaps, turning my power elsewhere. And that moved me more than all the rest. For my strength was ever being used for her. Service of her was the law of it, as I now knew it had been its origin. I sometimes had ado not to sob, when watching her young head bent over the page of a text-book, images of great and brooding protection of enfolding and strong and jealous wakefulness, filled my breast as I looked. I felt in those moments that for every hair of her head I could have killed a man and felt no compunction afterwards.

Evie caused me far more anxiety than Archie did. At all times Archie's vanities, quite as amusing to watch as those of any young girl, would blind him to much that lay an inch or two beyond the end of his nose. He was, moreover, deep in his examination work, and I had no doubt that, once the examinations were over, he would indulge himself in a mild little "burst" and flatter his seraphic self he was rather a devil in his way. But she was more difficult. For one thing, hers was a richer nature. She had, or would presently have, far more to give; and already I saw that, as surely as Miss Windus was one of Life's takers, Evie Soames was one of Life's givers.

I watched--how I watched!--for the slightest of her unconscious betrayals; and, of course, by dint of watching I was able to find a thousand that presently vanished again. I drew trifling tremendous conclusions from the merest nothings. She could not make a gawky, captivating little movement but I would found something upon it, not a pretty coltish gesture but I had my inference to draw. The smile, perhaps, where lately the laugh would have been--the little check of recollection, even as she was perching herself with a tomboyish swing on the edge of a table, that she "was grown-up now"--slight little ceremoniousnesses, stilted little phrases and momentary forgettings again--I missed not one of these. My lovely, lovely flapper! Did you know that you were twenty different creatures in a week, each beyond words adorable until another swelling nodule yielded and allowed a peep of a yet inner tender and rosy heart?

Of course I see now that I was far too clever in all this. I had, in fact, taken the course that was least of all likely to tell me what I wanted to know. For, as a face seen daily shows no change and yet grows relentlessly older, so, because of my watching, she changed under my eyes and my eyes did not tell me she had changed. I have had in my time various things to say about "woman's intuition." I, like the rest of us, have set half of it down as guessing and the other half (the half that events falsify) as a convenient forgetfulness. Well, I hope I make amends when I admit now that in all this I owed my final enlightenment to a woman, and to the woman to whom I would least of all have been indebted--to Miss Windus.

It was on a Friday evening that this enlightenment came to me. Fridays were ever a pain to me, because of the three whole days that must elapse--five if she failed to appear on the Monday evening--before I could see Evie again. Believe me, the last minutes of those Friday evenings always cost me dearly in emotion; and in order that I might make the most of them I had some time before discontinued a former habit of mine--that of working in the senior students' classroom. By so doing I had forestalled any remarks on the fact that I was frequently to be found in the same room as Evie. And even then I knew I was lucky to escape Miss Levey's Hebrew intensiveness.

But on that Friday night I was restless. An absurd trifle had unsettled me (but I have told you how much such trifles meant to me)--nothing more than an alteration in Evie's way of arranging her hair. Until then it had been drawn back and massed in a thick little clump on her nape, showing beautifully the small round of her head; but now she had parted it (I did not think altogether more becomingly) in the middle, and had evidently been making desperate attempts to "wave" it. Certainly the change gave her at once a more adult air, which I supposed I should get used to, unless, as was likely, she changed it again in the following week. Her blouse also was new. It had a high lace collar up to her ears, and I didn't like it in the least. It was mere concealment, without concealment's charm.

I was restless. I had begun the evening by working, for once, in the senior classroom again; but presently, not happy where I was and not wishing to go straightway into the lecture-room where Evie sat, I had compromised by packing up my things and going into the room adjoining hers--the general room. The reference books were kept in the general room, and, presently, having need of one of these, I had crossed to the shelf and taken it down.

I ought to explain that these books were kept in three projecting bays, such as one sees in libraries, that stood out at right angles from the wall. Thus the books of each projecting wing faced both ways and between the bays there was just room enough for the short library ladder of three or four steps with the vertical staff to steady yourself by as you stood on it. As I could easily reach any book there without the ladder, I had passed the bay that contained it, and had taken up my place on the farther side of the wing nearest the window, where I stood with the open book in my hand. I forget what the book was.

As I stood I heard Miss Windus and Miss Causton come into the adjoining compartment.

I had no great interest in either of these women--I may say none, since I could not see Miss Causton's fluent hand; so, merely noting their arrival, I was continuing my reading when suddenly I heard the name of Evie Soames. It was Miss Windus who was speaking.

"... Oh, I suppose so; in her way, of course--if that's all men want!" she was saying. "Don't you think?" This with a little acidulous rising inflection.

Then I heard Miss Causton's indolent voice in reply. From the way in which she spoke I fancied she was eating sweets. It had lately struck me that she ate more sweets than both the other girls together, and if it wasn't sweets it was something else.

"Don't ask _me_, my dear," she drawled. "_I_ don't know what the creatures want."

"Of course not. They do seem to want such--odd--things. The way I'm looked at sometimes--I declare it makes me feel perfectly ashamed!" said Miss Windus. Why she said it I don't know. It was the purest hypocrisy, and it was not likely to impose on Miss Causton, who had a nonchalant, still humour of her own.... But on second thoughts I don't know. I was not always sure, afterwards, when I got to know Miss Windus better, that she didn't really labour under some such delusion as this.

"Do they?" Miss Causton asked lazily. "They don't worry me much. So long ago since I've seen one that I've nearly forgotten."

There was a short pause, then:

"Really, they stare so," Miss Windus continued, "look one so out of countenance--one really doesn't know which way to turn!"

"No?" came Miss Causton's ironical dawdle. "Oh ... with a chance, my dear ... _I_ should!" ... I suppose she smiled as she said it. While appearing to lay herself perfectly open she had far more to hide than Miss Windus had.

Miss Windus was shocked.

"You _dreadful_ girl!... But really Louie, you must have noticed it. Why, you can see it the moment she comes into the room!"

"Really?" came the other detached voice. "How quaint!... Who do you think she's after? Not the Baboon?..."

I imagined the chuckle I didn't hear. I took it that the Baboon was myself.

"Mandrill, my dear," Miss Windus corrected. "You really must take a memory powder!..."

"Oh, I call it baboon," Miss Causton remarked with indifference. Then she laughed.... "How ridiculous you are! He's as big as a man ought to be anyway----"

"Oh, quite!"

"----and I declare you can look at him till he's quite good-looking!"

"Oh!..." (I could almost see Miss Windus' quizzical eyes.)

"Really, you are absurd!..."

There was another short silence.

"And by the way," Miss Windus next said, "_he's_ been rather--different somehow--lately, don't you think?"

Sweets crunched for a moment, then:

"Different?... Do you mean _he's_ been looking at you in that--ahem!--dreadful way?"

"What, _that_ creature!..."

"Beg yours, dear----"

"_I_ should think so!... But I fancied he'd been somehow--not quite the same----"

"Well, anything for a change, as the song says. Myself, if I found I couldn't get along without 'em, I should prefer----"

But a "Sssh!" interrupted Miss Causton. Somebody had come into the farther bay, and the rest for a time was whispering.

When next the conversation became audible its tenor did not seem to have changed.

"Scented soap in a little celluloid box, too!" Miss Windus admired.

"One must keep oneself clean," Miss Causton threw off. "Have some of this, dear. I simply had to have some chocolate nougat to-night!..."

There was a rustling of tissue paper.

"Well, it's a sign, and so's her hair-waving and polishing her nails and that lace yoke," Miss Windus resumed.

"Oh yes, the pneumonia blouse----"

"_And_ her heels--_and_ a scent-sachet!..."

You see that I was quite deliberately listening. I am not putting on any airs about it. I might have been Polwhele. I wanted to know, so I listened. I did more than listen too. I watched. I knew that the shelves were only half full on the other side; only a screen of stout wire separated the books facing one way from those facing the other; and by pulling out a book or two on my side I should probably find a peephole.... Very softly I pulled three or four out, found my opening and looked. Miss Causton appeared to be standing with her back towards me; I couldn't see her; but I could see Miss Windus, sitting on the library ladder holding its short staff, with her plaid skirt pulled tightly about one carrot-shaped thigh.

They began to talk again.

"And another thing that makes me _quite_ sure, dear! She's going to young Merridew's next week-end!"

"Oh!..."

"Don't be absurd. You know what I mean. To his parents', of course; they live in Guildford.... Not that _she_ told me, oh no! Not her ladyship!"

"Who did, then?"

"Not her, though I gave her _every_ chance! Six months ago she'd have told me like a shot, but we're getting so blessed artful these days!... He told me."

"Then it doesn't look as if it _was_ the Baboon?"

"Oh, I daresay she'll leave you your Baboon if you want him."

"Thanks. I think I should know which way to turn in _that_ case," Miss Causton replied evenly. "Coming?"

And they left the bay together.

It was by this admirable piece of Rixon Tebb & Masters' work that I learned what, it appeared, I had been watching too closely to see.

VI

I had intended in any case to spend the remainder of that evening with Archie Merridew. Mingled with my restlessness there had been a tremulous sensitiveness that had culminated half-an-hour before in a fit of satanic pride. Lately (I had decided) it had come to be taken rather too much as a matter of course that our frequent adjournments after the evening class should be always to his quarters and never, or hardly ever, to mine. I had quite enough to bear without further gratuitous rubs of that kind, and I had resolved that I would make myself his host that evening though he had lived in a mansion and I in a sty.

But after what I had so altogether discreditably overheard now I had fifty other reasons for wishing him to come along with me. Almost every sentence that had been spoken on the other side of that bay of books had contained a reason. But I realised that before I could trust myself to face him I must swallow the anger that crowded thickly into my throat. There was nothing to gain and everything to lose by letting him see my rage. So I walked back into the empty senior classroom, there to remain until I should have got the worst of it over.

By half-past nine I had got myself in hand. I gathered my work together. Students were coming to the row of washbowls in the small compartment at the end of the senior classroom to wash their hands, and Evie gave me the smile that was to be my nourishment for three whole days as she passed with her towel and the cake of soap in the new celluloid box. Archie had been working all the evening in the typewriting-room; now was my chance, before he could make (supposing him to want to make) any appointment with her, to secure this myself, and I hurried for my hat and coat and sought him.

"Ready?" I said.

"Right-oh; just a minute," he replied. "I told 'em to keep my fire in--I'm going to swot like blazes to-night."

"Oh no--you're coming along with me this time," I laughed. "I shall be ashamed to show my face at your place much oftener ... unless," I added lest he should shake me off, "you love me merely for what I have----"

He laughed too. He was at the young and squab-like stage that takes a pride in scorning appearances, and even finds the heart more rather than less honest when the waistcoat over it is shabby. He accepted with quite a good grace, got his hat and coat, and we went out together, I giving Miss Windus an unimpeachable "Good-night" as I passed her, hardly a yard from the spot where I had peeped on her less than an hour before.

The electrograph opposite my abode was an advertisement of "_Sarcey's Fluid_," some sort of a disinfectant; and as we approached it Archie looked up.

"Phew!... Needs it rather, to-night, doesn't it?" he laughed.

It did not seem to me to "need it" quite so badly that evening as it had on some other evenings--warm summer evenings, for example--I had known. December had come in rawly, and the chestnut stoves and baked-potato engine were out. The poorer streets have no pleasanter smell than that of baked potatoes, broken up, sprinkled with salt from the big tin caster, and closed together again like a South Sea face with a mealy smiling mouth, and I had slipped a couple of these into my pocket for our supper. I suppose Archie meant the fried fish papers in the gutters and (as we entered by my side door) the acrid smell of the public-house; but it was part of my fiendish pride to rub those things in a little that evening, and I made light of them as we mounted the stairs.

"Oh, you're pampered, Master Archie," said I. "I had thought of asking you round to supper next Saturday evening--not to-morrow, a week to-morrow--but I think I shall save my hospitality."

You see what I was already angling for. Well, I caught my fish. Of course he couldn't take Evie down to his folks at Guildford without my knowing of it, but I wanted to see the fashion in which he would make his avowal. We had left the carpeted corner of the stairs that the great ornamental public-house lamp illuminated brightly and were standing on the bare landing outside my room. He answered without an instant's hesitation.

"Afraid you'll have to, Jeff--twice over," he replied. "I've got to go down home that week-end; beastly nuisance! I was going with some fellows over to Richmond--stag-party; but the mater writes that she's asked Miss Soames, so I suppose I shall have to be there to help out--confound it!"

I opened my door and let him into the red and green.

"Oh?" I remarked casually. "Nice change for you. You'll be all the fitter for the exams. Don't tell _me_ about your stag-parties though. I know 'em; you'd take jolly good care not to pick the place with the plainest waitresses for tea, what? _I_ know you!... But if I were you I'd go steady for a week or two, my boy, that Method paper'll be harder than you think, I warn you!"

"I'm watching it!" he replied cheerfully. "By Jove! Jeff, I'd forgotten what a noisy pitch this of yours is! What on earth makes you stay here?"

"Oh, I don't know," I replied carelessly, applying a match to the wick of my lamp and replacing the chimney. "As I say, you're pampered. The place is all right. I don't do much except sleep here. It's a bit cold, though. I'd keep my coat on if I were you----"

"Wouldn't be much sleep for me here," he remarked, sitting on the edge of my bed. "I should want a good stiff drink before I slept much in this racket!"

As I placed the lamp globe on its brass ring I glanced covertly at him. It was a green interval, and his face looked as if he stood by a chemist's window near the big pear-shaped green globe, while his waistcoat was turned to a black purple, with one brass button gleaming green as a cat's eye. Then the red came again, and the lamp flame crept up. I went to the little cupboard where I kept my few cups and saucers and plates. I filled my kettle at the tap on the landing, put it on the half-crown oil-stove, and began to prepare our feast.

In a quarter of an hour it was ready--tea, the baked potatoes, and a wedge of butter apiece. We ate it, he sitting on my bed, I in my sagging and string-mended old wicker chair. I saw quite plainly that already he wanted to be off, and would stay no longer than the barest decency demanded; but he had got to eat that pauper's meal before I let him go, and there were my forty-nine other reasons for having got him up there.

One of these other reasons had, during the last hour, taken complete shape in my mind. Its consequences would have been impossible to foresee, but as far as it yet went, I thought it crafty enough. I filched another look at him; he was burning the roof of his mouth with hot potato as he lolled against my bed foot; and I judged it time to put my plan into execution.

I pushed my own plate away and sank back into my lifeless old wicker chair. He had turned his coat collar up by this time. My plan kept me warm.

"You're a lucky beggar, you know, Archie," I sighed heavily.

He had moved, to set down his cup of untasted tea on the floor. He looked up.

"How?" he asked.

I settled myself farther back.

"How!" I repeated almost vindictively. "Don't you call it lucky having a house and people and so on?"

"Oh! Everybody has----" he began, but corrected himself. "I mean, I thought you meant some special luck!"

"Oh no--just that," I murmured. "Having a place to ask people down to when you want--that's all."

He seemed surprised. "Do you mean Miss Soames?" he said.

"Miss----?" I shook my head absently. "Oh no, I wasn't thinking of Miss Soames--I was thinking of something quite different."

He meditated for a moment.

"You _have_ seemed a bit different lately.... What's up?" he demanded, looking squarely at me.

My plan, to which his last words gave a new and unexpected fillip, was briefly this:

When, over the case of reference books, I had heard Miss Windus make the very remark he also had just made--namely, that I had been "different"--I had had a swift access of alarm. In what particular I had betrayed myself I didn't know, but I realised very clearly, and doubly clearly now that the same remark had dropped from Archie himself, that love and a light cannot be hid, and that if my extreme former care had not secured me from remark no care I was likely to be able to take for the future would do so. I had laid myself open, and should do so again. How was I to cover myself?

I thought I saw my way. I invite you to consider that way.

Were I to give it out to Archie--or rather, not so much to give it out as allow a surmise to dawn on him--that my heart was already pre-engaged in some carefully unspecified quarter or other, not only would this "difference," both he and Miss Windus had remarked on, be admitted and accounted for, but I should at one stroke set myself free from a hundred other trammels of gossip, past, present and to come. After that avowal nothing I did would be unaccountable. I should have a definite place in the general sex-understanding. I should be classed, out of the running, filed and docketed, totally uninteresting to either Miss Windus or Miss Causton and rid of the attentions of Miss Levey.

And I should also--my heart had thrilled suddenly and poignantly as I thought of this--I should also be admitted at once to privileges. I should have my share in such freedoms and exemptions as the married man knows fully and the attached bachelor at least to a probationary extent. This state of things does by tacit acknowledgment exist. The man who can say all to one woman can say more than other men to all women. And the shining immunity I now saw before me would even include what so far I had had to deny myself--conversation, thus safeguarded, with Evie herself.

"By heaven!" my heart now cried within me, "I will do it!"

And instantly a perfect seething of the cautions and reserves with which I must do it sprang up in my brain.

But here was Archie patiently waiting for me to speak.

"What's up? What the dickens are you talking about?" he asked once more.

I let my head drop, as a man might who discovers he has said too much. "Oh, nothing," I replied.

Archie was just as sharp as--neither more nor less than--I wished him to be.

"A lot of fuss about nothing--if it's really nothing," he said suspiciously.

The next moment he had looked hard into my face, taken a long breath, and, suddenly bringing his hand down on his thigh, broken into loud laughter.

"By Jove! Jeff--I really believe--let's have a look at you--by Jove! I really do--_I believe you're in love_! What a----How ripping, I mean! Best congratulations, old chap--my turn this time--ha ha ha ha!"

I drew myself heavily up. The kind of thing I was doing has to be done rather carefully. "Look here, Archie--" I began, trembling between the wrath I felt and the not-too-much wrath I must appear to display; but he interrupted me:

"Well, that's a knock-out! Who'd have dreamed----"

"Why not?" I demanded sharply.

"Oh, I didn't mean that!" he made such haste to say that it was plain as a pikestaff that he had meant precisely "that."

"I only meant, how surprising--how unexpected. I mean----"

I frowned. "_Should_ you find it so--if it _were_ so?"

"Should!" he said, puzzled. "... Isn't it so, Jeff?"

"No," I replied; but a "No" that so exquisitely contradicted itself that I gave myself nothing less than admiration for the performance.

"No?" he echoed. "You're lying, Jeff--you _are_!" he broke out triumphantly. "I can tell by the way you say it! So _that's_ it! Dashed if I didn't think there was something!... Who is she, Jeff?"

But that, as you may suppose, it was no part of my plan to tell.

Neither was it part of that plan to enjoin either secrecy or the other thing upon him. That, I thought grimly, might quite safely be left to take care of itself. "Mandrill, my dear; you really must take a memory powder!..." I seemed to hear Miss Windus' voice again over the bookshelves. Oh yes, if he would give currency to that Zoo nonsense he could be trusted not to keep the richer joke, of Jeffries in love, to himself!

For that he and not Evie had been responsible for this pleasantry at the expense of my appearance I had concluded by a much sounder process of observation and reasoning than that my love-lorn state predisposed me entirely in her favour. My watching, a failure in other respects, had at least succeeded in this respect. And that I had found had not been without its barb for me. You may remember my former pathetic gratitude that, while others singled me out for marked treatment, she alone had not, in the trifling forms and observances that are the gracious outside of intercourse as distinct from its inner truth, differentiated me from the rest of the world. Well, I had made a guess at the reason for that. It was, in a word, her upbringing. The aunt with whom she lived in Woburn Place had taught her to "behave nicely," and so on. I could see that education. Such maxims as that one must not "judge by appearances," that "handsome is that handsome does," and, generally speaking, the unexceptional tradition that the "less fortunately circumstanced" have special claims on superior gentleness and pity, form almost the whole of it. I, it appeared, was one of these "less fortunately circumstanced".... Of course nobody was to blame. By-and-by the amiable aunt would probably go a little further, and teach her that it is not enough that these unimpeachable precepts should be merely observed, but that the thought behind them must be concealed as well. When you treat a poor devil just as if he was anybody else you must not let it be seen that you do so from perception that he is not.... Anyway, there it was, and it rather took the shine out of that "good-night, Mr Jeffries" that had sent me off happy to Archie's rooms on the evening when I had been so startlingly shaken out of my fool's paradise.

Thus I was persuaded, and as it turned out quite rightly, that it had been young Merridew, and not she, who had allowed his tongue this licence both on Weston's physical characteristics and my own.

His cup of tea was still on the floor, and by this time was cold. He hadn't tasted it, and, his renewed congratulations on what he supposed to be my blissful state of mind over, was once more fidgeting to be off. But it was quite at my own pleasure whether I released him or not; I had the hateful advantage of my baked potatoes and my poverty; and though he was getting colder moment by moment, being less accustomed to the lack of a fire than I, I did not spare him.

"Yes," I remarked musingly by-and-by, as if I had been thinking over a former remark, "I'd take that Method paper quite seriously if I were you. Save up your little fling till that's over. Stag-parties and work don't go together, my son."

He had a little gleam of perspicacity. "What little fling?" he asked. "Who said I was going to have one?"

("Carefully, Jeffries," I cautioned myself.) Aloud I said cheerfully, "My mistake, Archie--I'm out of the running in these things--I'm rather a Puritan by necessity, you see. Perhaps I was taking it rather for granted----"

He chuckled. "A Puritan by necessity! A Puritan by Miss Whatever-her-name-is, more like! Do at least tell us if it's anybody we know, Jeff!"

But I ignored the latter part of his remark. "Well done, Archie," I applauded. "I'm glad you see that when a man's got one woman he's no need for all the others. Stick to that and you're all right."

And that clinched it. "Well, you've got the pull over me there," he said.

I made no reply.

You need not conclude, unless you wish, that I wanted to start him straight away to the devil. I couldn't have ensured his arrival at that destination if I had. But I was prepared to go half way with him if by so doing I could keep him from getting into paradise by the means I had reserved for myself. I was doing him no conspicuous harm. He would have to rub shoulders with the world before long--was already doing so; and I said no more to him--nay, I said far less--than he would have picked up for himself in almost any gathering of young men of his own age that he was likely to find himself among.... So presently, when after (how shall I put it?)--after having tapped it home that there _was_ the one woman and also the others, I returned to the examination in Method again, I was talking as easily as if, his betrayals to Miss Windus notwithstanding, we had been the best friends in the world.

"By the way, that's another thing you're lucky in, my boy," I said. "The exam's in the daytime. I suppose that doesn't convey anything to you."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it means something to me. I shall have to get a day off."

"Well?" he inquired.

"Well--it doesn't by any means follow that I shall get it."

He stared. "You don't mean to say they'd be such skunks as not to let you off for a day!" he exclaimed.

I laughed. "Perhaps they won't be such skunks," I remarked.

"Oh!" he cried, outraged. "They _couldn't_!"

He was as ignorant about Rixon Tebb & Masters as he was about everything else in life.

Presently, with a "Brrr!" and a shiver, he got off my bed.

"Well, I'm off," he said. "I didn't intend to come round, and I'm going back to swot."

I heaved myself up from my chair. "Must you? Well, wait a moment--I'll come down with you----"

Before I turned down my lamp, filling the room with the red and green again, I noticed his untouched cup of tea on the floor. I made no remark on it, but as I preceded him down the narrow stairs I found myself suddenly filled with a curiosity as to whether I guessed rightly what was passing in his mind. I had made my shot, and was as interested to know whether it was a true one as if I had had a bet on it.

Where the great public-house lamp shone brightly through the landing window the stairs branched, one flight descending to the side door by which we had entered and the other leading to the back bar of the public-house. It was as we reached this bifurcation that I found I had guessed rightly.

"I say," he said, "I'm beastly cold! Come this way and have a drink!"

I shook my head.

"Not here," I said. "Not on my own premises, so to speak. If you don't mind my having something thin I'll come over the way with you."

"Anywhere," he said, with another shiver.

There was another public-house just beyond the _Sarcey's Fluid_ advertisement. We crossed and entered it.

"Rum--hot!" he called familiarly, peering under the frame of pivoted glass panes and flipping on the counter with a florin to attract the barmaid's attention. "Come along, Flossie--hurry up!... What's your poison, Jeff?"

He had his rum hot; but I drank nothing stronger than peppermint.

VII

His incredible gaucheries apart, I had no reason for hating him. One does not hate a youngster seven years one's junior merely because he is a mass of inexperience and self-sufficiency. Once again my hate was really a hatred of the whole dreary circumstances of my life, and, when I saw this concentrating stormily over young Merridew's head, I made attempt after attempt to divert it. I swear to you I made these attempts. I made them first of all to save him from a contest so unequal as one with my wrath must be; and if I made them later so that I myself should not be merely the slave of that wrath, I still made them. And all the time, as I say, so long as he did not stand in my way, it was a matter of indifference to me whether he took the upward path or that which led downhill to perdition.

Unfortunately I was in love, and no man in love can stand by the rules that he knows ought to govern his conduct. Those jealousies I have spoken of as torturing me at Rixon Tebb & Masters' shook me in spite of myself. When I felt their approach I took care to give young Merridew a wide berth; and I confess that in sometimes letting these fits have their way with me I found an abominable ease. Away from him, my heart was filled with rage and revilings; but these very outbreaks enabled me at other times to meet him with a smile on my lips and a welcome in my eyes. Once I had got rid of the over-plus of my rage I could almost have persuaded myself of my affection for him.

So I alternated, as the red and green of my apartment alternated; and perhaps the red seemed redder and the green greener by the mere force of the contrast. I continued to walk home frequently with him after the class, to share his supper frequently, and to be obliged to him for my necessary bath.

I very soon learned that in the matter of my reputed being in love he had done exactly what I had intended he should do--had whispered the news about the college. It required no further eavesdropping to tell me that; I felt it in the altered air. I saw the knowledge peering through the little scalene triangles of Miss Windus' eyes, saw it in the looks of sleepy and amused curiosity with which Miss Causton favoured me. The latter lady, indeed, sometimes positively alarmed me, for the glances I suffered when I chanced to enter a room in which she was at work held incalculable things, and I no longer dared to look at her own amused and supercilious eyes, her fascinating hands, or that foot beneath the hem of her dress, fine and slender as a violin. And with the least encouragement Miss Windus would, I knew, have sought my company, and, lacking an admirer of her own, would have eased her breast to somebody else's of all the things about love at large that she ached to say to somebody. I wondered, seeing them both, whether there was no middle way with women. The whole sex seemed to be divided into creatures (or rather a creature, for I set Evie apart) to be enskied by men, and the other kind, that a man might fly as he would fly a wild animal. And I am not sure even now that when these two things are found in one and the same woman they ever really shake down together. They seem to go on existing, independently, unreconciled, side by side.

But Miss Levey was far worse. She always seemed to me to crave information, useful or useless, from a mere acquisitiveness; and I may say now that it was she who, later, first roused in me the uneasy suspicion that unless I was exceedingly careful I should find that I had undertaken more than I could well manage. She began all at once to show quite a liking for my company. She mislaid books in the room where I sat, got into difficulties with copying presses when I was about, and glanced up at open or closed windows too high for her reach, as if she felt a draught or the lack of air, it didn't matter which, and must suffer until somebody came to her help. All this had its rise in the idlest curiosity, unless, as I sometimes suspected, she had made a bet that she would get out of me who this imaginary _fiancee_ of mine was, and was determined to win it. One day as I saw her struggling with the blind cords in one of the window bays, and advanced to her assistance, she relinquished the cords, and then, as if to apologise for the trouble she was causing me, said, "Oh, thank you so much--you see I'm going to a dance to-night, and have a slight cold already.... You don't go to dances, do you, Mr Jeffries?" I answered that I did not, whereupon she said gaily, "Oh, you must learn! I'm sure you could find _some_body who would teach you! Then you and your partner could join our set--such fun!"

And another time she actually came to me with tickets for one of her "hops," and pointed out to me that I should be saving a shilling by taking both a pink ticket as well as a blue one.

But while these were the results of my whispered false intelligence on Miss Windus and Miss Causton and Miss Levey, the results on Evie Soames were both foreseen and unforeseen. I had foreseen that it would give me a new liberty with her; but I had not foreseen that she, and not I, would be the first to take advantage of that liberty. It came to me entirely as a surprise that she should see no reason why, if my heart was engaged, she should not speak of it as a matter of course to myself.

This, to my great confusion, she did.

It was in the small back room that we called the library, among the book-shelves and glass-cases of mimeographs and gelatine copiers and patent tills, that she did so. I had seen her talking to Weston in the empty lecture-room as I had passed through to restore a book to its place--a new translation of "Schmoller on the Mercantile System," I remember it was--and she had turned as I had passed. I think she had been a little nervous about the pretty little exhibition she intended. It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that she had actually practised the words she was going to use, and I am quite sure she meant to go through it creditably. My lady was even then looking forward to the time when, on a small scale or a large one, she would have to do these things. So she followed me into the library, and, with one slender hand on the iron ball-arm of the copying press under the gas said her little piece.

"Oh, Mr Jeffries!... I hear I have to congratulate you!"

For a moment I did not take her meaning. Then it dawned on me, and I felt a quick constriction of my heart that was both bliss and pain.

"Oh?... On--on what?" I asked. I couldn't help stammering a little over it.

She wore a brown cloth tailor-made costume and a thick knitted cap of white wool; and the shadow of this cap over her large eyes was not so deep but that I saw the almost reproachful look in them. It was almost as if she echoed: "'On what?' Can such a wonderful thing have happened to you and you ask 'On what?'"

"On this we hear of your engagement," she replied, looking down at her toes. "It's--it's true, isn't it?"

For the second time I felt my facile invention sitting somewhat less easily on me. I stammered again, while she, I am quite sure, misattributed my embarrassment.

"Who told you that?"

At that she was sweetly arch.

"Oh, a little bird, Mr Jeffries! Don't tell me it isn't true--it would be almost--almost like bad luck----"

"Bad luck?" I repeated foolishly.

"I mean, like wearing your wedding dress before the day, or something like that--congratulating you too soon, I mean----"

By this time I had collected my thoughts. "It isn't true," I said.

Instantly her face fell adorably. In its expression I fancied I detected both indignation against her misinformant and mortification that her dear little attempt at social competence had failed.

"Oh!... I'm _so_ sorry!" she murmured, all dejection and shame and rich colour. "Please forgive me!"

"It isn't true," I said, "that--that I am actually engaged to be married."

Like a flash she was all eagerness again. She had a book in her hand, not a college text-book but a novelette; and probably the whole of the novelette was in her glad change of tone. I was not exactly engaged to be married, but I _was_ in love, and I daresay her brain was already a jumble of surmises about obstinate parents, secret wills, _marriages de convenance_, and true and severed young hearts.

"Oh!" she said again. "I'm so--I mean I hope I shall soon be able to--I mean I hope I'm not rude if I----" She floundered, already out of her depth.

"Not at all," I said gravely. "I only said I was not formally engaged. There are--other reasons for congratulation after all----"

"Oh, then I _do_!" she cried impulsively, with a grateful look that I had helped her out. "I'm _so_ glad!"

Then, her ordeal over, she glanced towards the door.

But a daring impulse seized me. This was on a Friday night, and I knew that on the morrow she was going to Guildford.

"I see you're just leaving," I said. "Would it annoy you if I were to walk a little way with you?"