Chapter VI: Part III: The Garret (1)

I

Poor, fussy, well-meaning Kitty had done it--had done it all unwittingly. In telling her vaguely where I lived I had left the number of my house unspecified, and when a letter had come for me to the Business College on an evening when I had announced my intention of being away, she, inspired by the urgency of my affairs, had got a directory and readdressed the letter to me at Rixon Tebb & Masters'. It was a letter from the firm into whose service I hoped soon to enter, and I examined the flap of the envelope carefully when finally it did come into my hands. Polwhele (I have little doubt it was he) had steamed it open, read it and closed it again.

This time all I could get out of Gayns, whom I once more approached, was that Rixon Tebb & Masters' had no use for an employee whose mind was already elsewhere.

It was true that the sack from Rixon Tebb & Masters' was not now a matter of the first importance. That was not the thunderbolt. Scanty as my wages were I had still saved up nearly three pounds out of them; and, as the letter that Polwhele had tampered with contained the news that I might hold myself in readiness to begin my new work a month from that date, the sum was enough to tide me over. But the letter had a postscript. This was a merely formal intimation that it was assumed that I could produce the usual references of steadiness, reliability and so forth. I myself never dreamed that I should be denied them.

I was denied them, however, by Polwhele.

"But--but," I stammered, aghast.

Polwhele referred me to my real employers, the Agency. I gave him a long and gradually lowering stare.

"Do you mean----" I began slowly.

"I mean what I say," he snapped; and as he turned away he added in a lower voice, "You ain't surprised, are you?"

And, remembering how I had seen him with his fingers in Mr Masters' waste-paper basket, I could not say I was.

Again I sought Gayns. This time the cashier flew into a passion.

"Confound you!" he cried. "You're more trouble than all the rest of them put together! What is it now? A character? Oh yes, you can have a character! I'd advise you not to show it to anybody, though! First leaving us--then coming back--then days off--then dickering with other firms! Go to Polwhele--go to the Agency--go to hell!"

I left Rixon Tebb & Masters' without references.

Without references my new firm refused to have anything whatever to do with me.

I come now to the deepest slough of my poverty.

It was early in the month of June that I was thrown out of work, with thirty-five shillings in my pocket. The drizzling winter had given place to a glorious early summer, and the days increased in heat until they became torrid. Men walked Piccadilly at night in evening dress, with their light dust-coats thrown over their arms; and ragged urchins hailed the appearance of watercarts with whoops of joy and danced barelegged in the refreshing puddles behind them. Horses wore straw bonnets, out of which their ears stuck ludicrously up; in whole districts the water supply began to be cut off at certain hours of the day; the pitiless sun gave every street the appearance of a hard, hot snapshot; and, as the heat got on people's nerves, the cries of children at play became intolerably strident.

My corner at King's Cross was well-nigh insupportable. Why the quantity of torn paper in the gutters should redouble the moment the sun begins to glare on London I do not know, unless it be that the fried fish and ready-cooked provision businesses suddenly boom; and certainly the refuse in which I frequently walked ankle-deep was mostly heavy with grease. Even had I been able to afford it, my "pull-up" had now become such a stove that I do not think I could have entered it. I dined, or rather supped, late at night, at one of the coffee-stalls where the electric trams now sweep round from Gray's Inn Road to St Pancras Station; and I breakfasted (my only other meal) on bread and the water I drew from my tap on the landing before it was cut off. The council didn't save much in my case by cutting the supply off. I filled every vessel I could lay my hands on early in the morning. As Miss Causton had once said, one must be clean, and Archie, whose bath I could now have passed my days in, was seldom to be found in his rooms near the Foundling Hospital now.

For three weeks I trudged the streets looking for work; and then a bit of luck befell me. The new "professor" at the college broke down under the heat; it was not desired to give up the Friday evening advertisement-writing class; and I daresay my anomalous standing at the place, something between student and pathetic high-and-dry "institution," was the cause of its being offered to me. I got five shillings for the evening, and that five shillings kept me for five days. I discovered that I need not pay my rent. The first week I missed doing this I made a shamefaced apology to my landlord, the publican, and discovered that he was not a bad sort. It was too hot to worry about trifles, he said, and so set himself a precedent that cost him pretty dearly until, long afterwards, I saw to it that he was not the loser for having harboured me during that time.

Wherever I sought work my inability to produce a character damned me; and on the other hand I was not a Discharged Prisoner. Two or three times I was taken on casually, once as a packer at a large furniture emporium, once at a stocktaking for bankruptcy purposes, and once (I forget how I tumbled into this) I spent a whole day locked in an upper room of a town hall, counting the voting-papers in some borough or vestry election--a lucrative ten-shilling job. This was before I got, and retained for some weeks (until I had the Corps of Commissionaires down on me), the post of hall porter at the offices of a sporting paper. I will tell you about that presently. You will see that I am making all the haste I can to have done with this horrible time.

Among other things, the general deterioration in my appearance had forced me to tell Kitty Windus that I was out of work. But I had made light of it, saying that, on the whole, it was rather a good thing, as I needed some sort of a spur; but I daresay Alf and Frank had said the same thing many a time. Presently my former boastings, about the great things I was shortly going to do, had committed me to the lie that I had at last found employment. It was my week's stocktaking that I told this particular lie about, and Kitty never knew when that temporary job came to an end. Nor, poor girl, did I tell her what she had done when she had forwarded that letter to Rixon Tebb & Masters'. It would become me ill to say that she stuck to me because it was myself or nothing for her; already I had begun to dread that it would be no easy matter to get rid of her when I might find it necessary to do so: and many a time, as my despair grew upon me, sweeping all personal reluctances and physical repugnances aside, I threw pride to the winds, and ate, in her sitting-room in Percy Street, the only food I had tasted during the day--becoming an Alf or a Frank in very fact.

For--perhaps this was partly the effect of the unrelenting heat--her insipid coquetries had begun to exasperate me more and more. I became increasingly petulant when I was commanded to "tiss eentie finger" and to look into the little scalene triangles of her eyes and say that I loved her. Presently, I am afraid, I began to cause her many tears. We wrangled frequently. I was "near," I was "close," I did not treat her as other engaged girls were treated, I never took her anywhere except for a bus ride, or to a cheap theatre once in a blue moon.

Then one day, without warning, she brought it up against me that I had "given her the slip" that afternoon on Wimbledon Common.

Of this I was technically so innocent, but morally so entirely guilty, that I broke out into anger, and there was a scene.

"I know some girls are younger and prettier than I am," she broke out, with unbridled temper, "but you _did_ ask me to marry you after all."

"So I did," I admitted, in a tone that made her flame.

"Yes," she cried shrilly. "And not only that--I've seen you looking at Louie Causton too."

"Oh?" I said, noting with relief that her jealousy was not specially of Evie. "Well, there are one or two pleasing points about her."

"And she was the only one you danced with at the party."

"Before I asked you to marry me?"

"And me--you've never _once_ taken me to a dance, though I've _seen_ Rachel Levey offer you tickets."

"Perhaps you've seen me look at Miss Levey too?"

"And you never spoke to me, and sat behind the books with Louie."

"Well, there only remains one other suggestion for you to make."

And so on. It was degrading in the extreme. But I was sufficiently punished for it later, when she lay with her head on my breast, sobbing out phrases of contrition for her vindictive temper and supplication for pardon.

All, all gone now was the hour of exaltation in which I had heard the nightingale sing and had felt my glowing girl's breast heaving against my own. I was a hungry, desperate man, living a life against which I knew I should not be able to bear up indefinitely, and already glancing into the public-house as I entered by my side door and beginning to wonder whether they were not wiser than I who made use of the anodyne of drink. Why not drink, and forget for at least an hour? And one night, meeting Mackie again, and having eaten little, I did succumb, and for the first time in my life got drunk. I got drunk at his expense. He had heard the news of Louie Causton, and wanted to talk about it. I, like a cur, let him.... I broke away from him at last, but not until my loosened tongue had said I know not what.

My relation with Evie during this time is difficult to define. She never quite put me back again into the place I had occupied before that Saturday when we had heard the nightingale together, but newer preoccupations overlay this relation. Archie now had money (I never knew quite how much) at his command; but he still showed no sign of putting it to the use Miss Angela, if not I, had expected--that of entering into a formal engagement with Evie. Miss Angela found excuses for this out of her own imagination--that his father had only lately died, and so on; but I could have set her right even then. I knew how things were drifting. From the little I remembered of my talk with Mackie, Archie had found in his coming into money quite another opportunity. What might have facilitated his marriage with Evie actually delayed it. He was getting rid of his money in Leicester Square again.

So Evie's name was associated with his, and yet there was no plighting between them, and Evie swayed, now happy but with a fear, now despairing, but not hopelessly so. There was no trouble she could have brought openly to me even had she wished, but nevertheless she often turned to me significantly full of silence. She, Kitty and I often walked homewards together through the sweltering streets, and when Evie had left us Kitty would speak her mind freely about Archie Merridew.

"He's one of the Jewness Dorey now!" she exclaimed one evening, taking the phrase, I don't doubt, from one of her "better class" novels. "And it's no good saying it's got nothing to do with us! I think _you_ ought to give him a talking-to!"

This was in the typewriting-room of the college, within ten minutes of the close of an advertisement-writing evening.

"What can I say to him?" I asked. "It's no business of mine." She little knew how much I had made it my business.

"Oh, that's just like a man!" she said impatiently, all aglow with the _esprit de sexe_. "The poor child's moping and fretting, and you say it's no business of yours! Of course it's the business of _all_ her friends!"

"Of all her women friends, maybe," I answered. "Well, if that's so, why don't you and Miss Angela have a talk about it?"

"As if we hadn't--twenty!" she cried. "You and your bright ideas. It isn't fair--it _isn't_ fair to Evie!"

"But what is it you hope for?" I asked.

She stared. "Why, that he'll marry her, of course!"

"Quite so. But I don't mean that. I mean, do you and Miss Angela think you can bring any pressure to bear?"

"Yes, I do--young idiot!" she broke out. "He ought to be ashamed of himself!"

And I didn't doubt that a certain amount of pressure might be brought to bear. If it was made less trouble for Archie to marry than not to marry, he would probably marry. He had not manhood enough, if it was clearly shown that marriage was expected of him, to hold out. And I knew how those marriages turned out.... I meditated.

"But," I objected, "why meddle? You know what a marriage of that kind would be! You see what he is anyway!"

But here I had touched Kitty's limitation. For her, as for her novels, marriage was the end of the story. If joybells closed it nothing after that mattered, and the look she gave me was a personal confirmation.

"But," she went on presently, "you could help, Jeff. We women can't talk to him--though he's not getting very many smiles from _me_ just now!"

I smiled. "You're an unscrupulous crew," I remarked.

"Will you see him?"

"Well--I won't say I won't."

"But _will_ you?"

"Perhaps--if I see a fitting opportunity."

"A fitting. Look!" Her voice dropped. Evie had just come into the typewriting-room on her way to wash her hands before leaving. "I'll tell you what," Kitty said quickly; "you go along with her now. See if it isn't as I say. Then tell me whether you won't give that little idiot a dressing-down at once."

She had quite forgotten that twinge of jealousy that had been the cause of our recent scene. If she hadn't, the more honour to her sense of sex comradeship. It was about this time that I was beginning quite frequently to forget that our relation was that of lovers, and as long as I could forget that, she had pathetic little magnanimities that I even admired.

"All right, if you wish it," I said.

So for once Evie's society was absolutely thrust upon me.

That night she was all that Kitty had said--plunged in despondency. She was, of course, "in love with" Archie, but that after all is only a generic expression. Even love comes down to cases, and I think that in her case, even then, she was wondering whether, had things happened a little differently, she might not have been equally "in love" with somebody else. Of that I myself had never a doubt. With Archie's money, or even a decent job, I would have flouted the whole world in my triumphant security that I could make her mine. And I should do so yet. Though for the present my power might go a-begging, I vowed that it should yet be taken and richly paid for. The dark and solid houses were less solid than that something I knew to be within myself, that makes and unmakes houses and streets and towns and lands.... But gently, gently; I was not out of the mire yet; by-and-by would be time enough for these boastings; things must go on as they were for a little while longer.

So though I did not speak a word to her that night that bore directly on the case as Kitty understood it, I did more. I did--I know this now--make her feel that, glooms and delights apart, she had in me an affectionate friend to whom she would not come with troubles in vain. I have been told, and am inclined to believe it, that I have this power with women.

And her eyes were soft with friendship as I left her.

"Good night, Jeff," she said fondly, as I took her hand. "I do like being with you sometimes."

And that night, as I lay half suffocated in the room I did not even pay rent for, the words rang like a chime in my head until the morning noises marked the beginning of another torrid day.

* * * * *

The commissionaire's job I spoke of I got in an odd way. I got it through the combination of my unusual size with unusual strength. I was walking along Fleet Street that day when a horse fell, and I, with others, helped to raise it again. When we had finished, a man at my elbow spoke both casually and penetratingly.

"That was as good as anything I've seen for weeks," he said. "Have you had much practice in holding a whole horse up while the others fasten the buckles?"

I laughed. I had certainly had the heavy end of the job, but "Not quite that," I said.

He gave me a scrutinising look. "Out o' work?" it seemed to say; but he did not speak the words.

"Here, come and have a drink," he said.

His name was Pettinger. He was a sporting journalist, and so a judge of "form" and "condition." I was not in the best of either, but I must have struck him as having "the makings" of I don't quite know what. He gave me a drink, which I didn't want, and a plate of sandwiches, which I did want rather badly; and he also gave me, as I say, this commissionaire's job. Pettinger is a friend of mine to this day; and since he is a simple and lovable animal of a fellow (he fully concurs in this description of himself) he is the only man I can bear to speak much to about that time when, clad in a sky-blue uniform, I kept the door of his newspaper office, touching my cap to proprietors, and being jocularly prodded by sportsmen and journalists, as if I had been an ox at Smithfield Show.

II

It was about this time that Archie Merridew's light was once more beginning to show regularly, evening after evening, over the leads of his top floor near the Foundling Hospital. This was after a period of months during which his abode had been in complete darkness. But as his visits to the college had become infrequent, and as I did not know what he might be up to, I had kept away.

When, some little after my commission from Kitty, I did look him up again, it was by no means that I might deliver Kitty's message. I went, rather, as a matter of attention to detail. There were certain things I could not afford not to know, and, more important, there were certain appearances I could not afford not to keep up. Nevertheless I did not dream with what consequences my visit of that evening would presently be fraught.

I was in a state of great nervous irritability before I went. The weather still continued almost insupportably hot, and to my other discomforts had been added a new perturbation that worked on me none the less that in all probability it was quite groundless. The evening papers had started a scare about "low-flash oil"; my red and green room was little cooler than a furnace; and I had lately begun to glance at my cheap lamp from time to time as if it had been a bomb. I mention this merely as an indication of the state to which I was becoming reduced. I thought of that lamp, I remember, as I walked from the college to Archie's rooms that night and half hoped in my peevishness that the thing had exploded in my absence.

It was only ten o'clock, but Archie was already in bed. He wore blue silk pyjamas and on a small table by the side of his bed stood a medicine bottle and a siphon; but when I asked him whether he was ill that he had need of these last he made light of them. It was this beastly weather, he said, and perhaps the beastly weather also accounted for his drinking the milk that Jane presently brought up in a sealed bottle. When Jane had gone, Archie, with an attempt at his old disarming impertinence, turned to me and said, "Well--how's the blue uniform, Jeff?"

Ah! He knew of that!

"Didn't think I'd heard, did you?" he grinned. "Well, I only did hear yesterday. Nothing to be ashamed of, old chap. I know one of your fellows, you know----"

I too knew the sub-editor whose name he mentioned. He was something of a bird of the night too. Already the fact that Archie knew of my occupation had set me swiftly revolving the new dispositions I should certainly have to make in my relation to Kitty and Evie.

"Ah, yes," I said. "I shouldn't attempt to drink with the sub-editor of a sporting paper if I were you. You've been trying, I expect," I added, looking suspiciously at him. He seemed drawn and ill. He never had any stamina.

"Sha'n't tell tales out of school," he replied, with another weak attempt at his old facetiousness. "Well, how's the fair Kitty?"

Ill as he was, I could have boxed his ears for the tone of it, but I answered his question, and he grinned again.

"Rare good sort," he said appreciatively. "Give us a splash of that soda, and pass those cigarettes, Jeff...." Then, lighting a cigarette, "Look here, you old scoundrel," he said, "I've got a crow to pluck with you! Guess what it is?"

I could not.

"Well," he leered. "I saw Mackie the other night."

You will remember what had happened the last time I myself had seen Mackie.

"So there!" he triumphed, after some recital or other that had for its point my single fit of intoxication. "_Now_ what about it, you old humbug?" he demanded.

I knew I must keep my face and smile. I did not know why I must do these things, but I did them, looking at him and noticing again how sallow and changed he was. Then I looked about the room, mentally commenting on the evidences of the patrimony that had done him so little good--his new dressing-gown, his silver-topped bottles, and a new travelling-case, these things thrown anyhow among his older belongings. One of the newer objects I held in my hand; it was the gold cigarette case I had passed him; and I gazed smiling at it as he went on.

"Yes," he told me, with humorous accusation; "Mackie told me all about it--ha ha ha! What price the old puritan Jeff now? Eh? Sad dog, sad dog!"

I replied, quite calmly, that the dissipations of commissionaires were limited by their circumstances.

"And what the devil are you doing being a commissionaire?" he demanded. "I'll tell you what it was, Jeff," he continued familiarly, "that failure in Method seems to me to have broken you all up. What the dickens made you fail?"

I was conscious of an interior stirring of hate. What, indeed, had made me fail!

"Oh, over-confidence, I suppose," I answered lightly.

And he continued to talk.

At last I rose and said good-night. He raised himself on one elbow in order to shake hands.

"Come in again and see a chap soon," he said. "It's hellish slow up here all alone."

I was already at the door, but I turned abruptly.

"What do you mean?" I said. "Do you mean you're laid up? You said you weren't."

But he only gave a confused little laugh. "Eh? Laid up? Of course not! Can't a chap turn in early once in a while?"

"'Once in a while'?... But you said----"

"That you might come in and see me? Well, do. No harm in that, is there? Say I'm going slow for a bit, that's all," he added.

I agreed with him that to "go slow" for a bit was a course he might with advantage have adopted some time ago, and, though considerably puzzled, I turned slowly away.

My lamp, I discovered when I reached my dwelling again, had not exploded in my absence; but I did not light it. This was not, of course, through any actual fear; it was merely part of my general nervous condition. I remember, as still further explaining that condition, that I had passed a Board School that day as the children had poured out for their morning recess of a quarter of an hour; I have said how more than commonly strident the heat seemed to make all noises; and at the sudden outburst of the children I had broken into a copious flood of perspiration. I was not much steadier now. Pushing the lamp aside I flung up my window as high as it would go, drew out my old string-mended chair, and, sitting down, began to stare at the "_Sarcey's Fluid_" advertisement across the way.

The rippling of its incandescents had a trick that always fascinated and irritated me intensely. Before the last letter of the first word was an apostrophe, but its single bright spot always appeared out of its proper order. S--A--R--, and so on, the thing ran, but the whole legend was complete before that apostrophe started into its place. I used sometimes to watch as if I hoped the whole mechanism might suddenly alter, but, of course, it never did. I began to watch it again that night, while my ceiling and the wall above my bed became red and green, red and green, red and green....

I am afraid that what I am now about to say I shall have to ask you to take on trust. I have no evidence to offer of a phenomenon that, I am told, is shared by madness and genius alike. Nor will I trouble you either with any talk of prevision or of inner certitude, nor with the gradually deepening brooding that led up to this phenomenon--the brooding over the countless slights and slurs and rubs I had suffered from Archie Merridew's reckless and ignorant tongue ever since I have known him--my appearance, my private affairs, the side-splitting joke of Jeffries being in love. I will pass straight to the sudden and complete illumination that, as I sat there, so irradiated my intelligence that I wondered why it had come to me now, an hour later, and not then, the moment I had seen him lying at that extraordinarily early hour in bed.

It came, this flash of illumination, in exactly the same manner as the changing of the electrograph before my eyes--and, as you will see in a moment, with the same bloody apostrophe. And with its coming my room was not more suffused with the crimson glare than my mind suddenly was with the same morbid and flaming and dangerous hue.

_I had suddenly realised what was really the matter with Archie._

Let me now tell you the kind of man I have sometimes, though possibly mistakenly, supposed myself to be.

He has aspired, that man, I have sometimes supposed myself to be, to the stars; but his feet have also known the burning bottom of the pit. His heart has been lifted up until sometimes, through eyes drowned with tears, he has had his poor and fragmentary glimpse of a larger Fatherhood than earth knows; but he has also exchanged intelligence with the devil. His heart has flowered with loves and charities; but that same heart has also been a rock with a toad in it. He was born in heaven, but has lodged in hell. So in him, according as he has been used, have opposites met.

And yet, as I say, I may be wrong in supposing that I am this man.

Yet the man who, in my red and green room that night, leaped up from his chair, and with a bursting, ringing cry shook his hand on high, was not the James Herbert Jeffries who now writes this feverish shorthand. He who writes the shorthand was not the same James Herbert Jeffries who stood, with those violent dyes flooding his face, vowing that if that sick young buyer of infected merchandise dreamed for one instant of doing that which it was sought to make him do, and which apparently he was ready to do, he should pay for it with the last thing he had to give. That James Herbert Jeffries was plunged in that hour into a place of stench and infernal brightness that God forbid was ever his destined abode.

I cried aloud, shaking my fist up at my cracked and blackened ceiling:

"_Though Christ died for man in vain ... let him but think of it ... let him ... let him ... and I...._"

After that I passed into a curious state of mind. You have heard how I make, when I can, anger serviceable to me, but here was an anger past my bringing into control. Yet, as ordinarily I plan calmly, so was I calm up to a certain point now. The result of these two things was that my brain worked like a worn and cranky machine, sometimes doing more than it ought, sometimes less; sometimes jerking startlingly ahead, sometimes refusing to work at all. And as there was thus no continuity in my thought, and as my recollections are curiously associated with that changing red and green that now for the first time seems to me to have run through my story like a fateful burden of jealousy and blood, I will set down such isolated reflections as rise of themselves out of the jumble of my mind.

* * * * *

_Crime_ (I realise that the word leaps with some suddenness into these pages) has suffered more at the hands of criminals than it has at the hands of justice. There are few perfect crimes. Most of them are accidental, the mere explosion of momentary passion. And that is well, for the world wants few masterpieces in that sort. I have not read De Quincey's essay on the subject, nor ever shall now; but if crime is to be considered as an artistic medium, it is the only medium in which bungling is better worth to the world than competence. Other arts one prefers to see superlatively practised or not at all; but it is only of the bungled crime that man can endure to think.

* * * * *

The ordinary criminal begins at the wrong end. Dull fellow that he is he does not recognise that his first task must be the creation of an attitude of mind. Or if a glimmering of this does cross his inflamed consciousness, he thinks that it is the attitude of his own mind that is of the first consequence. That is why he suffers either the retribution of justice or the visitings of his own conscience. In either of these cases his act is unsuccessfully committed. He pays in common with his victim.

* * * * *

It is not the injured man who knows the full quality of hate. It is the one who injures. The injurer has no refuge from his own transgression; he has him whom he has injured constantly upon his mind--perhaps upon his soul. Another is the lord of his peace of mind. Thus it is peculiarly the wronged man's part to pardon, but when the wronged man would not pardon, but would avenge for another's sake?

* * * * *

Could Archie be given a mind more sensitive than a stone? Could his weak and spongy nature be hardened to a point of view? Could such an attitude be created in him that what otherwise would have been an assault would take on the stern justice of a punishment? Can any dull or egotistical mind be either punished or rewarded? Ultimately, can the God who created it do anything save quench it again? Wickedness may be vanquished at the last, but Ignorance----? And Conceit----?

* * * * *

But bah! Probably he was not even thinking of it. Perhaps he was even now seeking a way out. Well, I would help him. Ten words to him in private.... Faugh!

So _that_ was it.... And the world allows it! Could he be proved to be merely insane at the time of his marriage the world would not allow it; a mental insufficiency beyond his control would be a bar; but this other, that he had deliberately sought, would be allowed. And Evie....

* * * * *

That bloody apostrophe again!...

* * * * *

The criminal forgets too much in the moment of action. It is a sort of stage fright. Rehearsed perfectly, however.... Not that the thing is not admittedly difficult. A button, a fingerprint, a drop of blood, the resources of the laboratory, the microscope, the spectroscope--oh yes, it cannot be said that there is not a deal to watch. And a memory, a chance association years afterwards, an attack of debility rendering the eyes subject to deceits--any one of these things may at any moment throw him into the hands of the law as a fate more merciful than that which he has not been clever enough to forestall within himself. Yes, there is much to consider; but then, as all the world knows, masterpieces of crime or what not, are difficult of accomplishment.

Ten words, then, on the morrow, and he would never dare....

* * * * *

But bah! I was not even sure! He _could_ not be contemplating it, and I was vile to think it.... Still, prudence. I must make sure. Till then, nothing--not even these thoughts that ticked as if out of a tape-machine from my brain. To-morrow....

* * * * *

Yet, ah! I was sure for all that!

* * * * *

This red and green, this red and green!

* * * * *

These are such fragments of it all as I can remember. I don't know how long they occupied me. I had begun to trace with my fingers little patterns on the deal top of my table, patterns that sometimes had a meaning for me, sometimes not, but that always had a meaning for Archie Merridew if he thought ... if he as much as thought....

Then the red and green advertisement was switched off suddenly. Only a rhomb of dim gaslight on my ceiling remained....

But I still sat in the darkness, my brain taking those backward and forward jerks, and my lips muttering, though without sound, that if he dreamed ... if he as much as dreamed....

III

It was a "record" even for myself to get the sack twice in one week, but that now befell me. They gave me no notice at the newspaper office, but they were decent, and I had a fortnight's wages in lieu of it. Pettinger especially showed himself my friend.

"It's rough on you," he said, "but I really don't see that anybody's to blame.... Look here, I'll tell you what we'll do. Go down to my place at Bedford; I'll telephone them you're coming; and you can do what there is to do in my garden for a week or two until something turns up. You won't mind working under the old chap I've got there? Right. Off you go. You've got your money, haven't you?"

"I shall have to come up for Friday evening; I've a class," I said.

"Well, have a change till then. You look as if you need it. Catch the twelve-fifty, and I'll telephone them now."

So I took off my sky-blue uniform and wondered, as I folded it neatly and laid it aside, where they were going to find the next man it would fit.

This was at half-past ten in the morning, so that I had some hours to spare. Ten minutes, if I could catch him, would suffice for all I had to say to Archie Merridew, and, as he was not an early riser, and had told me that he was not spending his days in bed, I hoped to find him before he went out. But as the Business College lay on the way I determined to call there first. I walked up Chancery Lane into Holborn.

But he had not arrived at the college when I got there, and I did not wait for him. I had walked home with him often enough to know his unvarying route, and I set off for his place half expecting to meet him on the way. But I did not meet him, so I knocked at the brass knocker of his ivy-green door.

Jane told me he had only that moment gone out.

"To the college?" I asked.

Jane thought so, but was not sure.

"If I don't see him I'll call again," I said. "Tell him, will you?"

I returned to the Business College, and there waited, talking to Kitty, who had just arrived.

Kitty seemed extremely embarrassed that morning, and of course I guessed the reason. She had heard of the sky-blue uniform, doubtless through Archie. (For two nights I had not seen her.) I was none the less sure of this that she did not mention the circumstance directly; nor did she comment on my being at liberty at that unusual hour of the morning. Presently she said:

"I don't think he'll come this morning now. He may this afternoon."

"I can't wait till the afternoon," I said, glancing at the little clock on the mantelpiece of the type-writing-room--the little clock that had given the "Ting" that had startled me so on the day of the examination in Method.

"Is it anything I can tell him?"

That, of course, was quite out of the question. "I'll see if he's back home yet," I replied.

Then Kitty's uneasiness and curiosity got the better of her delicacy about the sky-blue uniform. She looked fixedly at her thin wrists and her fingers gave little touches to the lace about them as she spoke.

"Jeff," she said timorously, "I don't know whether you know what--what they're saying about you--I'm sure it's a hideous lie, but--but it's upset me frightfully----" She stopped abruptly, and seemed even then to wish she had not spoken.

"You seem very easily upset nowadays," I said shortly, quite ready to quarrel if needs be.

But she ignored my tone. "You know they're saying--everybody's saying--all the people here, I mean."

"What?" I demanded.

But her courage failed her. She stopped the fiddling at her wrists, and, giving me a long look said, "You know I love you, Jeff, whatever happens----"

It was what I had begun to fear--that there would be no shaking her off. She was far, far too faithful.

"I see," I said slowly. "I know what you mean.... Well, it was quite true. I _was_ a commissionaire--until an hour ago. They've sacked me.... I suppose Archie told you?"

"Girl-faced little wretch! But, Jeff----"

I took her up. "Well, it's that that I want to see him about. But as regards you and me--if you want it to make a difference----"

It was a plain offer to release her, but I don't think she understood it as that. Indeed, her manner puzzled me entirely. It was eager, shrinking, wistful and apprehensive all at once, and she appeared to be trying to shake off something--something preposterous. Well, that sky-blue uniform had been preposterous enough.

"It shall make a difference--if you wish," I offered again proudly.

"No," she murmured, apparently understanding this time, and busy with her lace again.

Then I entered into I know not what fantastic explanation of the curious fact that a man with the world in his grasp should have chosen to touch his cap to editors and proprietors. She tried to look as if she believed me, but it was plain that she didn't in the least. Once or twice she tried to interrupt me, but my patience was quickly running out.

"So you see how it was," I said at last, dropping my voice as Weston, the secretary-bird passed. "It was no business of his, and I want to know what he's got to say about it. You can tell him so if you like."

Again that inexplicable look of timorousness came into her small eyes.

"You _mean_ the commissionaire's job, of course?" she said.

"I mean the commissionaire's job," I replied.

That, I thought with satisfaction, would cover my real reason for wishing to see Archie as well as anything else.

Weston passed again, and gave me a look. That look struck me. It was just such a look as a policeman might give a loiterer whom he suspects, yet against whom he has no charge; and I felt my colour mount a little. That tattling little animal! Little he cared, as long as he had his joke, that my five shillings was put in jeopardy. For a business college that styles itself advertisement writer "professor" naturally doesn't want commissionaires on its staff, and I saw my second dismissal looming ahead.

Then, with a new and cautious idea in my head, I turned to Kitty again.

"On second thoughts," I said, "_don't_ say anything to Archie about my wanting an explanation. I'll settle with him. After all, it was bound to come sooner or later. It doesn't much matter. I'll see to it.... Well, I'm off. Good-bye, dear. I don't think I shall be able to see you again till Friday."

And I left her, nodded to Weston, and passed out.

I daresay you guess what my new and cautious idea was. I had something of the last privacy to say to Archie; it was just as well that I should have the cloak of comparatively trivial personal remonstrance to cover it; but this was only part of it. The truth was that my brain had suddenly taken another of those startling leaps forward. In some conceivable last event (I was not planning one, you understand; it was merely that my mind was working somewhere ahead, independently and beyond my control) it might be necessary that I should have _no_ personal quarrel with him. In such an event none must suppose that our relation had been other than amicable. Yet I should be overdoing this (purely anticipatory) prudence to pass over the episode of the sky-blue uniform entirely. The thing was, or might become, a matter of nicely measured proportions. Already I was making the slight private affront serve my turn; presently I might want to make the pardon of that affront serve my turn also. This kind of thing is what I mean by the creation of an attitude of mind and "attention to detail."

I made one more attempt to find Archie as I walked to St Pancras, but he was still not at home. Then I had to run for my train.

I worked in Pettinger's garden that week, carrying water, wheeling barrows, and filling baskets with fruit as I passed between the canes. Pettinger was away for two nights, but on the third evening he came up to me as I was pushing a heavy roller over the lawn and began to talk. I think he began for the sake of a pleasant word or two, but something I said seemed to engage his interest, an hour or more passed, and then, as the phlox and canterbury bells began to glimmer in the twilight, he suddenly said, "Leave this and come inside--we can talk comfortably there."

We went in. I shall never forget that night. It was made memorable by the fact that master and gardener talked till two o'clock in the morning.

"Well, Jeffries," he said at last, with a sleepy yawn, "you're an extraordinary chap. I'm afraid you've made rather a lot of work for me this last hour or two."

"How so?" I asked.

"Well, I was going to try to get you a job something like your last, but you're a difficult man to find a job for. I won't ask you whether you know you're extraordinary; of course you know you are; and I'm going, if I can, to give you a chance--a real chance--not like that other--those cut-throats--what's their name."

I had told him about Rixon Tebb & Masters' and the rest of it.

"I've a bit of a pull here and there," he went on sleepily. "There's the 'Freight and Ballast Company'--I know a couple of their men--but we'll talk about that in the morning. I'm off to bed. Hope they've made you comfortable?"

It does not come within the scope of my present tale to speak of my later rapid rise; but I may say now that I owed my chance to Pettinger and to the berth he got me, with the coming of winter, in the offices of the "F. B. C."

I remained in his house all that week; then, on the Friday evening, I took a return ticket to town in order to attend my class.

I had not been half-an-hour in the college that evening before I was aware that something had happened. Archie Merridew was not there, but Evie was, and so was Kitty Windus. I went through my work as usual, and then, at half-past nine, sought Kitty. It was she who told me the news.

"You've not heard, have you?" she asked, with a glance towards the senior students' room, through which Evie had just passed. Again she was, in some manner I could not understand, eager, reserved, apprehensive and fidgety all at once.

"Heard what?" I asked.

"About Evie. It's come off. She and Archie are properly engaged."

From that moment dated a division of me into two separate men, of which I shall have more to say presently.

"Oh?" I replied, with complete calm. "That's good news indeed! Wait here a minute--I'll speak to her--don't go, for I want to see you."

I met Evie returning with her towel and celluloid box of soap. She too was excited, so excited that she would have passed me, but I thought I understood that. I stopped her.

"Well, Evie?" I said, smiling.

She waited, painfully full, I couldn't help thinking, of emotion.

"It was you who congratulated me before," I said. "It's my turn now, I hear."

She looked at me and away again, and again at me and away.

"Thank you, Mr Jeffries," she said, beginning to make little pointings of her foot this way and that on the floor.

I spoke very gently. "Jeff--or Mr Jeffries if you prefer it--wishes you nothing but happiness, Evie," I said.

"Oh, thank you," she said, with increasing perturbation, "thank you very much indeed--thank you really--Jeff."

It was odd in the extreme. She gave me the reluctant "Jeff," and somehow I wished she hadn't, it came with such difficulty. Something, I was convinced, lay behind it. I did not expect her in the circumstances to be quite collected, but her manner was--I don't know how else to describe it--almost that of a child who has pleaded with authority for permission to bestow one final charity on an undesirable associate.... What! I thought, she also ashamed to know a commissionaire!

"When are you going to be married?" I asked, after an awkward pause.

"Quite soon," she replied, equally awkward. "As soon as I can get my things ready." She stopped.

"I suppose Archie's coming here for you--to-night, I mean?"

"No--he's got a man to see--a friend--in Store Street, I think."

"Then may I walk along with you?"

She seemed to have feared the question. "Oh," she said quickly, "if you don't mind--I've something awfully private to say to Kitty--she and I have arranged to go on together."

("Not wanted," I said to myself.) Aloud, "Well, I hope you'll be happy, Evie," I added.

"Thank you," she said again, lifting curiously appealing eyes for a moment.

I turned abruptly from her, and sought Kitty, who was still waiting. I had picked up a sudden suspicion, and wished to confirm it.

"Ready?" I said, in a tone as matter of fact as I could assume.

Again she began to flutter. I couldn't understand what had come over the whole college.

"I'm sorry, Jeff," she began, with rapid effusiveness. "If I'd only known you wanted--but I've got to go somewhere."

I knew that, Evie had just told me.

"Woburn Place, you mean?"

"No, dear--somewhere else--quite different."

"Really?" I said, incredulously smiling and frowning both at once.

"Of course! How funny you are!"

I looked searchingly down into her eyes.

"I think _you're_ funny," I said slowly.

"You really must excuse me, Jeff--if you'd only let me know."

But I had had enough of this. Gently but irresistibly I took her arm.

"Come along, Kitty," I said quietly. "I particularly want to talk to you."

She quailed, but still hung back.

"Very well," I said. "Will you tell me where you're going?"

She was obstinately silent.

"You're going with Evie, of course?"

I knew by the little rush with which she spoke that she was telling the truth and was relieved to be able to do so. "Oh no!" she said. "I'm going quite alone, quite alone--honour, Jeff!"

"Evie's not going with you--to Store Street or wherever it is?"

She stiffened. "I don't know what you mean by Store Street, and I think you've got Evie on the brain," she said.

What the devil ailed them all?

And why had Evie said she was going with Kitty?

As abruptly as I turned away from the one I now turned away from the other.

The next moment: "Er--'Jeffries!" I Heard.

It was Weston with my five shillings. I turned.

"Oh, Jeffries! I'm sorry to say--glad in one sense of course--that Professor Hitchcock will be taking the class again next Friday. The college wishes--wishes to thank you for stopping the gap as you have done. It's been most obliging of you."

I said something--I was glad Hitchcock was better, I said.

"Yes--er--he's quite well again now--quite on his feet again," said the secretary-bird. "And--er--Jeffries--I'm exceedingly sorry, but I've a rather unpleasant duty to perform."

I was utterly mystified. "What is it now?" I demanded almost roughly.

"It's that the Board is of opinion--has come to the conclusion--that consisting as we do of younger students than yourself--it would be of advantage--perhaps of advantage to you too if--if----"

I helped him out. "If I don't come again?"

"I wished to break it gently to you--but that _is_ the substance of it," he stammered.

Curious....

"Thank you, Weston," I said. "I quite understand. Will you please tell them that I didn't ask for any explanation?"

Exceedingly curious....

"Yes, yes, yes," he murmured sympathetically.

"Now," I said to myself some minutes later, as I descended the stairs, "it only requires Miss Angela to turn me down."

I walked to Woburn Place, and there asked a Swiss boy if I might see Miss Angela. Archie's friend Mr Shoto passed me as I waited in the hall, but I did not speak to him. After some minutes the Swiss boy returned. His answer was what I expected. Miss Soames had a nervous headache, and asked to be excused from seeing me.

And all, I thought with amazement as I turned away, because for a week or two I had worn a sky-blue uniform!

IV

That division of me into two men that I have said dated from the time when Kitty told me of Evie's engagement to Archie Merridew was, in a sense, no new thing. I had felt it in some measure before, when I had deliberately avoided Archie that I might give my anger its head and had smiled in his face again when the fit had worked itself out. I had striven, too, to stand between him and the black rages he and my general circumstances had provoked.

But no sooner had the words, that Evie was now definitely engaged, come from Kitty's lips than I knew this division to be complete and irrevocable. Even did he withdraw in time he had still contemplated it; and in my soul I did not now believe he would withdraw. "The Devil was sick, the Devil a Saint would be." And I knew at last who his friend in Store Street was. A name, seen on a medicine bottle in his room, had leaped into my memory. His "friend" was some obscure practitioner of a doctor.