Chapter III: Part II: Verandah Cottage (1)

I

In speaking of the early days of my married life I must throw myself largely on your consideration. I have not guarded through the years that sharp impatience that I presently came to feel with that tiny house in the Vale of Health. Lately I have thought more kindly of it, as if at some stage of my journey through Life (though I cannot tell when) I had heard a call behind me, turned my head, and, forgetting to turn it back again, had continued to advance backwards, recognising things in proportion as they receded. I live now in a mansion in Iddesleigh Gate; that ambition of mine, my spur in the past, is becoming a mere desire that when I go my successor shall find all in working order to his hand; and so the shabby brown earth I once trod has taken the lightsome blue of distance, and many things are seen through a sheen that, perhaps, never was there. Therefore if you would see that sheen it must be by your own favour and through whatever of glamour time and distance have given to your own young years.

For, when all allowances are made, I still think that that relation which is more than friendship was ours. Male and female (the New Man notwithstanding) we were created, and to a lower conception than that I have never in all my life declined. I have seen that declension in others, and know how it sinks ultimately to the mere comfortable security of a banking account. Whatever else I have known I have escaped that. By what wide circuit of the spirit I know not, I have returned to find the divine where others have not stirred from grossness. And I have even had glimpses of that shadowy apocalypse that finds its images, not in thrones and sceptres, but in the flesh-hooks and seething-pots of the kitchen.... But to Verandah Cottage and the Vale of Health.

I was happy with Evie, she with me. From my daily leaving her at nine o'clock in the morning until my return at half-past seven at night, she had almost, if not quite, enough to occupy her; and though I could have wished she had more friends, so that when she had finished her work the summer afternoons might not have appeared quite so long, yet I exercised a care that almost amounted to a jealousy in this regard. Understand me, however. It was against no person that I protected her with this jealous care. It was always with pleasure that I learned that Billy Izzard had looked in and talked to her for an hour at tea, or that Aunt Angela had been up to take the air or to fetch her out for a couple of hours' shopping. I merely mean that I saw no reason for her identifying herself with a set of circumstances that before long would probably have changed completely. It was part of my Ambition that, until I should have attained it, we should be a little solitary. Nor was it that I thought that the people we might by-and-by be able to meet on equal terms would be any better than those we might have known at once. It was a question of the place we were ultimately to occupy. And I begged Evie, if at times she did feel a little lonely, to be patient for my sake. So for quite a long time Billy and her aunt remained her only visitors.

The house next door might have been untenanted for all we saw of its inmates, and that, I confess, made me a little angry. I did not know the niceties of the matter, nor whether the difference between a thirty-five pound rental and one of perhaps eighty pounds outweighed those confident dicta of Evie's penny journals about "cards," "calls," and the rest; nor yet did I deem it a reason for taking anybody to my bosom that only a wall separated our dwellings; but the fact that they, whoever they were, never called stiffened me. An eighty-pound house! To put on airs about a matter of eighty pounds!... But I saw the humour of it too, and laughed.

"I'm sorry if it's rather slow, little woman," I used to say, "but wait just a bit. Let's stick it out on our own for just a little while. You'd rather be with me, now, than have waited for a year or two till we were better off, wouldn't you?"

"How absurd you are!" she would reply, nestling up to me.

"Well, keep going for a bit longer, and see what happens. I'm not deliberately hanging back from Pepper's offer for nothing, I promise you.... And at any rate the Vicar will be calling."

You see, we had agreed on the imprudence of having children at once.

But the Vicar never came, which was a fair enough hit back if he meant it for one, since we only attended his church once, and after that, I am afraid, went to churches here and there, attracted by good singing, a beautiful fabric, a man with brains preaching, and other things that perhaps mitigated the quality of our worship. And very frequently we did not go to church at all, but explored the Heath instead. And often, on Saturdays and Sundays, we went still farther afield. Greenwich had been hallowed to us by our half-day's honeymoon, and as if in this Hampton Court had suffered a slight, we made amends by going to the latter place quite often. We must have gone four or five times that summer, so that we got to know the Lelys and the Holbeins and the tea-shops, and the long drag home again from Waterloo in the old horse-bus, quite well. And one week-end we spent with Pettinger, at his place at Bedford, with two cattle-show men, an actor and an International footballer, all on their best behaviour until Evie had gone to bed. Then, when I joined her, she accused me of having had more than one glass of whisky, and wanted to know what we had been talking about all that time. I tried to tell her "the bubonic plague," but my tongue betrayed me, and I came a cropper.

So, as I had done before during our engagement, I could look up from my work during the day, past the Duke of York's Column and over the Mall, and wonder what she was doing at that moment--changing our pillow-cases, popping the pared potatoes into the saucepan of cold water, dusting, washing up, polishing, or pottering about the flower-boxes I had set on our little balcony.

Miss Levey had still not been asked to come up and see Evie, but so quietly tenacious of her purpose did I divine her to be, that I was sorry I had not invited her at once and got it over. The thing was beginning to look almost like an unacknowledged contest between us. At times I forgot my original reason for keeping her at arm's-length--her forwardness, pertinacity, and racial hunger for the rags and bones and old bottles of gossip; and that she "spelt" to be asked was in itself reason enough for ignoring her hints. I may say that by doing so I cut myself from quite a distinguished circle of acquaintances, and on this point had sometimes to check my three clerks. For never a notability called on Pepper but Miss Levey, on the strength of being called in to take down in shorthand a conversation, claimed him for a close acquaintance. And as far as I can make out, she must actually have believed it, for she kept up the fiction even to us, who knew perfectly well all about it. Goodness knows what she told outsiders.... So with Whitlock, Stonor and Peddie it became a byword to say, when speaking of somebody exalted: "You know who I mean--that pal of Miss Levey's--Lord Ernest," or "Miss Levey's friend--what's his name--the President of the Board of Trade."

After the present of the silver cigarette-box, not to speak of the handsome compliment of their intoxication on my wedding night, I had thought it the least I could do to ask Whitlock and Stonor (Peddie lived out Croydon way, too far to come) to come up one Sunday and have tea with us. So they had been, and for two hours had displayed manners as highly starched as their collars. They had been, I fancy, a little surprised that, if I was a Balzac in a dressing-gown, my wife at any rate was no Sand in a flannelette peignoir. (For that matter, nothing was ever neater than Evie's skirts and blouses, and when by-and-by she began to make her own things there could hardly have been anything more becoming than her clear, sweet-pea-coloured muslins, that really would have been too rippling and Tanagra-like altogether had it not been for the stiffer petticoats beneath.) I surmised later that Stonor had taken, so to speak, a mental pattern of Evie, for matching purposes when he should come upon another girl like her; and Whitlock, whose pose it was that he would never marry, could on that very account admire the more openly.

The visit of the two clerks, of course, made my attitude towards Miss Levey all the more pointed; but I still preferred not to have her at the Vale of Health. And seeing this, Evie vowed that she did not want her either. The two Arab horse-tamers stood on our drawing-room mantelpiece, not because I admired them, but simply because we had nowhere else to put them; and they were all of Miss Levey that was absolutely needful to our happiness.

Yet I recognised that the lack, not of Miss Levey, but of company in general, was far harder on Evie than it was on me. I knew exactly why I didn't want overmuch company; Evie, who had the deprivation actually to bear, had to take the reason on trust. All my interests lay ahead; she knew only the tedium of the present. It was her part, if I may so express it, to keep bright those ridiculous empty candlesticks of Pepper's without my own certainty that candles were coming to fill them--to polish those rose bowls of Pettinger's without knowing where the roses were coming from. And I could hardly blame her if sometimes she seemed to be a little in doubt whether, after all, the things I prophesied so confidently were not merely fancy pictures of what I should like the future to be.

So, more to occupy her than anything else, I bought her out of my small earnings a hand sewing-machine, and paid for a lesson for her once a week at a skirt-maker's. And that made things rather easier. She could now pick not only her blouses to pieces, but her skirts also; and from a fear lest my interest in these occupations of hers might appear simulated when she showed me the results on my return at night, I actually did cast an eye on a costumier's or modiste's window now and then, relating to her, though goodness only knows in what masculine terms of my own, what I had seen. And during the day I could gaze past the Duke of York's Column with its wheeling pigeons and think of her, unpicking, pinning tissue-paper patterns, basting, threading the eye of her sewing-machine needle, or, with some garment or other tucked under her crumpled chin, trying to see the whole of herself at once in the narrow strip of mirror she had fetched from the bedroom.

Between Evie's happiness and my important affairs with Pepper, I do not know which was my major and which my minor preoccupation. If my Love and my Ambition were really one, that only meant that often I had to do half a thing at a time. Since Judy and I did not discuss our private affairs at the offices in Waterloo Place, it followed that we had to do so after the day's work was over; and, having been away from home all day, this sometimes caused me to absent myself for the greater part of the evening also. At first, unwilling to do this, I had brought Pepper home with me; but as he always seemed altogether too bright a jewel for our little cottage, and as Evie, moreover, besides getting flurried about what she was to give him to eat, always drew in her horns in his presence, reproaching herself afterwards that she had seemed stupid to my friend, that had not so far proved a great success. The only alternative was, that I should dine with him, getting away afterwards as soon as I could. I did not like this, but it was unavoidable.

From my observation of some at least of the hotels Pepper took me to, I judged that he had some sort of a running account, balanced afterwards, whether in cash or consideration, I knew not how; for often enough, barring the tip to the waiter, no money seemed to change hands. At other times and other places he paid what seemed to me extravagant sums. Sometimes he was in evening dress, sometimes not; I, of course, never was; and so, places where the plastron was _de rigueur_ being closed to us, I did not at first see Judy in the full blaze of his splendour. On the whole, we dined most frequently at Simpson's, where morning dress is not conspicuous; and it was one night at Simpson's that Judy mentioned this very matter to me.

"By the way," he said suddenly, over his coffee, as if he had been on the point of forgetting something, "better keep a week next Wednesday free. I want you to meet Robson."

I was conscious of a sudden slight constriction somewhere inside me. Robson was not royalty, but as far as I was concerned he might almost as well have been.

"The Berkeley, at eight," Judy continued. "You'll dress, of course!"

I wondered what in. His champagne-cooler and candlesticks, perhaps....

"You needn't be afraid of Robson," Pepper continued, perhaps noticing my dismay. "As a matter of fact, he's rather afraid of me, so _you_ ought to be able to pulverize him."

I saw that I must take my stand at once.

"You can bring Robson to Verandah Cottage if you like," I said shortly, "but I'm not going to the Berkeley."

"Rubbish," Pepper remarked lightly. "The table's booked. Robson's coming down from Scotland specially, and Campbell will be there too, and George Hastie. Hastie's put off a visit to Norway on purpose. You've got to tell 'em what you told me that Sunday at the Bull and Bush."

"Then if they want to hear that, they'll have to have it from you."

Pepper showed not a trace of impatience. "My dear chap, don't I just wish I _could_ put it as you did!" he flattered me.... "No, no; I've told them all about you, and it's you, not me, they're coming to see.... What's the difficulty?" he asked, with a little scintillation of amusement.

"The difficulty is that if you'd told me this a week ago, I should have stopped it."

"So I thought," he replied dryly.... "Do you know West's, in Bond Street?"

"No."

"Well, you'd better go there to-morrow." Then he patted my arm. "Can't be helped, Jeff. The plunge has to be taken. You won't find 'em snobs. It's the waiters you dress for--I expect that's why you dress like 'em. Good Lord, these chaps have got far too much on their minds to bother about _that_!... Go to West's and take my card; I'll 'phone 'em. I gave way to you before; if you don't give way to me now, you'll wreck us. I'd have had it at Alfred Place if I could, but I don't want Hastie and Robson there. So you go to West's to-morrow, and remember, a week on Wednesday, at eight."

I did go to West's on the morrow, and my brow grows moist yet when I think of it. It appeared that before West's could dress me they had to undress me, and my wild and half-formed thoughts that I might pass as a bushranger or miner or wealthy and eccentric antipodean vanished. Miners' flannel shirts are not patched as neatly as Evie had patched mine; bushrangers do not wear loose cuffs with gold-washed links at eighteenpence a pair; and the respectful "Sirs" to which my two acolytes treated me made my hands itch dangerously to knock their heads together.... So they ran their fingers over my burning body; and because Pepper had let me in for this, I partly, but only partly, got back at him by ordering an admirable lounge suit also, which, for all I know, he owes for to this day. Then I left that place of torture, almost prepared to think twice of my Ambition if it was going to involve very much of this kind of thing.

Evie had received the news of my approaching introduction to exalted personages with a certain wistfulness, which she had tried to cover with an extreme brightness of manner. Of course my position was altogether anomalous; that "scale of living" of Pepper's, coming far too early for my circumstances, was a white elephant; but I don't think it was that that made Evie at the same time brightly fussy and secretly shrinking. Rather, I imagine, it was that for the first time she began to fear my Ambition a little. I don't mean that hitherto she had been hoping that my great plans were baseless imaginings, but I do mean that she was settled and happy as she was, and that a Verandah Cottage twice as big would have contented her to the end of her days. When I brought that really splendid dress suit home (for I had had it sent to the F.B.C., not wishing those ducal tailors to know the poverty of my address), I think her mind suddenly enlarged to strange disturbing vistas, and she examined the stitching of the garments thoughtfully.

"They're beautifully made," she said softly. "I never saw anything finished like that. But I wish Mr Pepper had not had to pay for them."

"Pepper pay?" I laughed. "Pepper'll pay when the cows come home. It isn't that that's troubling me."

"What then?" she asked.

"I want to see you dressed like that too.... But don't you want to see me with them on?"

"Yes," she said, but as it were obediently, because I had suggested it.

I went upstairs and got into those costly garments. I had ordered shirts, and ties too, and, not being in the habit of wearing undergarments, I had to consider what to do with the small tab beneath the plastron that should have anchored me forrard. With my penknife I finally performed the operation for appendicitis upon it. Then, looking bigger even than usual, I descended, black, white and majestical.

"Your tie won't do," said Evie. "Come here."

But suddenly, as she was refashioning my bow, she flung her arms about my neck and burst into tears on my breast. Then, when I asked her gently what was the matter, she only withdrew herself, wiped her eyes, and said that she was silly. Queer creatures. It was only the newness and unfamiliarity of the prospect. It was as if she was quite happy in her poverty, merely thinking of riches....

I myself had the trifling care on my mind of who was going to sit with Evie while I lorded it at the Berkeley. Ordinarily I should have counted on her aunt, but Miss Angela had announced that she must go to Guildford that day on some business or other connected with the late Mrs Merridew's will. There was, of course, Miss Levey, but I still considered Verandah Cottage too humble for the friend of Lord Ernest and the confidante of the President of the Board of Trade. Evie protested that she would be quite all right alone, but that I would not hear of.

"I'll tell you what," I said. "Give Billy Izzard dinner that evening. I'll go round and ask him to sit with you. That'll be the best thing."

"I should be quite, quite all right, dear," she said again.

"No," I replied, "I'll get Billy. I'll write a note to him now. Then I'll show you the other suit."

The other suit did not flutter her quite so much. It was just as exquisite in its way, an iron-grey hopsack, with trousers for which I had had to peel three times, but it did not speak quite so plainly of functions and high assemblages. I really did not know where I was going to keep these two suits, as I had no trousers press, and our wardrobe accommodation was exceedingly limited; and I discovered, on arriving home early on the evening of the Berkeley dinner, that I had no summer overcoat fit for my _grande tenue_. As the choice lay between taking a cab the whole of the way and wearing my heavy winter ulster, I chose the latter alternative; and Evie tied my bow and turned up the bottoms of those trousers that pre-supposed broughams and wicker wheel-guards and alightings on red druggets under awnings built out over pavements.

"Billy'll be here in an hour," I said. "I'll look in on him as I pass. You'll be quite all right till then, and I'll be back as soon as I can. Good-bye, darling."

She stood in skirt and delaine blouse at the ivy-green, glass-panelled door, and waved her hand as I turned the corner. I sought the bus terminus in the High Street, treading carefully, for it had been raining, and there were puddles to avoid. The bus started. Twenty minutes later I got down opposite my old place with the gargoyles and terra-cotta ornaments. I mounted the stairs and tapped at Billy's door, entering as I tapped.

"Time you were starting for Verandah Cottage, Billy," I said....

The next moment I was staring open-mouthed at what was before me.

II

"All right, Louie--thanks," said Billy Izzard. "Right-o, Jeffries--I didn't think it was so late----"

But the model on the throne did not get down.

I had parted my ulster in coming up the stairs, and my dress beneath showed. The contrast struck me as brutal. For one moment I was conscious of it; I don't think that she was, even for one moment. I don't think she saw anything of me but my eyes. I did not of her.

Billy had turned his back on his work, but still she did not move. More even than my own ceremonial dress the bit of crochet woolwork that lay on the edge of the throne seemed to accentuate the drama that was all sight, with never a word spoken. As if my eyes had moved from hers, which they did not, I seemed to see the whole of that room that had been my own--the imps beyond the sills, Billy's traps, his arrangements of curtains about the four windows, the bed behind the screen where I divined her clothing to lie. I say I saw all these things without once looking at them....

The exquisite study was on the easel, and I saw that too--the thing as it was, east-lighted, admirably cool, the work of an unrepeatable two hours. Billy, I knew, would look on that canvas on the morrow as an athlete afterwards measures with astonishment his effortless jump. It was the eye's flawless understanding....

"It isn't a picture," Billy grunted over his shoulder, his fingers rattling the tubes in his box. "Where the deuce did I put that palette-knife?--Just a study--I had it in my hand not two minutes ago----"

Still she and I stood as motionless as a couple of stones.

"Dashed if I won't be methodical yet! I never--ah, here it is.... Right, Louie; I've finished. Chuck my coat over the screen, will you? Sorry, Jeff--I'd forgotten the time--but I must wash these brushes."

My eyes parted from Louie Causton's as reluctantly as a piece of soft iron parts from the end of the magnet. She moved, became alive, stepped down from the throne; and as she passed without noise to the screen I saw again, by what legerdemain of visual memory I cannot tell you, the soft flow of draperies that had always drawn my eyes as she had moved about the old Business College in Holborn.

Not until she had disappeared did I myself move from the spot I had occupied since I had taken my first two strides into the room.

"Just turn that thing with its face to the wall; I don't want to see it till morning," said Billy, bustling about. "Sha'n't be a minute----"

He dashed out with a cake of soap and a handful of brushes. The tap was on the landing below. From behind the screen came soft sounds as Miss Causton dressed....

I have wasted paper in trying to set down what my thoughts and sensations were. Not to waste any more, I will tell you instead what I did. It was some minutes later, and already the running of the tap at which Billy was washing his brushes below had ceased. Time pressed. Without quite knowing how I got there, I was standing by the screen. I spoke in a low and very hurried voice.

"Miss Causton----"

The moving of clothes stopped.

"I can't see you now--I'm late already," I said.

Miss Causton's voice had formerly been drawlingly slow, but it came back quickly enough now, and altogether without surprise.

"Yes, yes--I want to see you too--quick--how late shall you be?"

"I don't know--eleven--I can't ask you to wait----"

"I'll wait--I'll have my dinner here----"

"Where, then?"

"Where are you going?"

"Piccadilly way----"

Then, breathlessly, "Swan & Edgar's, at eleven----"

"No, no----"

"Sssh--there's no time to talk--there, at eleven----"

"Half-past ten----"

"Yes----"

Billy came in again, but I was away from the screen by then. "Better hurry, unless you want a cold dinner," I said, moving towards the door; and "Better hurry yourself," I heard him say as I left....

I dashed across the road for a bus that was just starting; but it was not for some minutes after I had settled myself inside it that I began to realise what I had just done.

Then as bit by bit I grew calmer, it struck me as in the last degree remarkable. What had so suddenly impelled me to say, "I can't see you now?" And why had she replied that she too wished to see me? Why should I have wished to see her at all? Or she me? And why that long, long stare of eyes into eyes?

Robson, the Berkeley, my painfully marshalled statement, Pepper and Hastie and Campbell and all--these things had gone as completely out of my mind as if they had had no bearing at all on my life and fortunes.

I had squeezed into a corner of the bus farthest from the door, and the vehicle had glass panels forward. These were blurred with a fresh shower, orange squares, with now the halo of a lamp moving slowly past, now a muffled or umbrella-ed figure. We pulled up for a moment before the pear-shaped globes of a chemist's window, ruby and emerald, and then went forward again, and I seemed once more to hear that breathless "Swan & Edgar's--eleven," and my own "No, no!"...

I had not wanted that. I had not wanted to keep her at _that_ corner, draggle-skirted, searching faces for the face she wanted, looked at in her turn, perhaps moved along by the police. For whatever I had thought before, if I had thought anything, that long union of our eyes had held no meanings of commonness....

But why the appointment at all?

"Well," I thought within myself as the bus drew up for a moment at the Adam and Eve, and then started forward again down Tottenham Court Road, "at least this explains the 'L' on the teacloth."...

After a lapse of time of which I was hardly conscious, I became aware of the glow of the Palace and the lights of Shaftesbury Avenue. By sheer force of will I dragged myself back to the present. Inexplicable as it all was, it must wait. My other business could not wait. Now for the Berkeley....

Perhaps the strange incident helped me rather than otherwise in a thing I had had quite heavily on my mind. This was the stepping out of the hansom I had picked up in the Circus and my entry into the hotel. Concerned with so much else, I had now no unconcern to rehearse. I threw my hat and coat into a pair of hands that for all I knew might not have been attached to any human body, and grunted out Pepper's name as if I had been a preoccupied monarch. I was one of twenty others who lounged or waited in the softly lighted hall, but I think the only conspicuous thing about me was my size.... Then I was aware of Pepper himself, beckoning to me across intervening heads and shoulders.

"Here he is--late as usual," he said, as if a nightly unpunctuality at such places as the Berkeley was a weakness without which I should have been an excellent fellow.

To my abstracted apology I added that not only was I late, but must leave fairly early also.

"Not unless it's for a woman," Pepper laughed. "We'll let him go then, eh, Robson? This is Jeffries--Sir Peregrine Campbell--Mr Robson. Well, let's go up. _Seniores priores_, Campbell."

We sought the private room Pepper had engaged.

Even had the deep disturbance of my meeting Louie Causton face to face (if I may call it that) not banished things of less consequence, I still do not think that, socially speaking, I should have let Pepper down too badly. It was less formidable than I had feared. Robson, whom I need not describe, since you know his face from his countless photographs, had evidently, from the look of his shoulders, brushed his hair after putting his coat on; and Sir Peregrine Campbell made his vast silver beard a reason for not wearing a tie beneath it. A watch-chain or a ring apart, Hastie's and Pepper's clothes were no better than those I wore. The table was round. I was put between Pepper and Robson, and Pepper's command to a waiter, "Just take that thing away, will you?"--the thing being a centrepiece of flowers--enabled me to see Hastie and Campbell on the other side.

Pepper's tact on my behalf that night was matchless. Especially during the early part of the meal, when Robson was talking about Scotch moors, Hastie of tarpon-fishing in Florida, and Sir Peregrine (in a Scotch accent harsh as a macadam plough) of places half over the globe, he protected me (who had seen the sea only at Brighton and Southend) with such unscrupulousness and mendacity and charm that I really believe I passed as one who could have given them tale for tale had I chosen; and I gathered that he had carefully concealed my connection with the F.B.C.... "Has Jeffries shot bear?" he interrupted Hastie once, intercepting a direct question. "Look at him--he doesn't shoot 'em--he _wrestles_ 'em--Siberian fashion, with a knife and a dog!... I beg pardon, Robson, I interrupted you----" And so on. He told me afterwards that my hugeness and my taciturnity had created exactly the impression he had wished. You would have rubbed your eyes had you been told, seeing me in those evening clothes, that less than four years before I had worn a commissionaire's uniform in Fleet Street and touched my cap to the proprietors of Pettinger's paper.

But until our real business should begin I took leave to drop out of the conversation more and more. That low, urgent whispering over Billy Izzard's screen ran in my head again, with the thought that I had made an inconvenient and apparently purposeless appointment for half-past ten. _Why_ had that quick exchange of whispers been as it were torn out of us, and _what_ had she to say to me, I to her?

Again I remembered her and her story. I remembered her cynical concealment of depth under the ruffled shallows of lazy speech, the dust it had pleased her to throw into eyes by her affectations of perverseness or indifference, her munching of sweets, her exquisite hands, her violin-like foot, her soaps and pettings of a person that even then I had divined to be ill-matched with her not strikingly pretty face. I remembered the vivid contrast between her and Kitty Windus--Kitty's ridiculous fears of non-existent dangers from men in omnibuses or under gas-lamps, and Louie Causton's nonchalant, "Men, my dear? So long since I've spoken to one I really forget what they're like!" And I remembered the event that had unstrung poor Kitty and shocked Evie once for all out of her unthinking girlhood--the news that, however it had come about, Miss Causton had one day given birth to a son. That son must be between four and five years old now....

Yet it was hardly likely she had wished to speak to me about her little boy....

And why had she sent Evie that piece of crochet as a wedding present? That too became the odder the more I thought of it. Had the teacloth been, not primarily a present to Evie, but a message to myself? The teacloth--that long, long stare--that breathless conversation over the screen--were these, all of them, calls of some sort to me?

Yet to appoint Swan & Edgar's, at half-past ten! I disliked that intensely. Not every lonely woman who has taken to herself a lover would willingly court what, were I but five minutes late, she would have to endure at that rendezvous. And the more I thought of it the more convinced I was that, not anything base, but austerity, command and a glassy clearness had lain in that long regard I had met on pushing at Billy's studio door and seeing her standing there....

Then it crossed my mind that Evie was probably thinking of me that moment and wondering how I was getting along in my high company....

I could not have told you that night what the Berkeley dinners were like. I ate and spoke mechanically, and plates were taken away from me of which I had barely tasted, yet of which I had had enough. Then there came an interval without plate, or rather with a plate, doyley and finger-bowl all stacked together, and I heard Pepper say: "Let's have coffee now and then see we aren't disturbed.... Well, what about business?"

Five minutes later we were deep in the matters that were the reason of my being there.

These again Judy handled exquisitely, making of my own statement especially the most skilful of examinations-in-chief. Ostensibly laying down lines of policy himself, he contrived that these should be a drawing of me out; and it was only afterwards that I recognised how frequently he set up a falsity for me, coming heavily in, to demolish. Though ordinarily I can concentrate my thoughts when necessary for a day and a night together, I have no power of sustained speech; and so Pepper "fed" me with opportunities for destruction or approbation or comment. No large occurrence in any part of the world is immaterial to our business; as we have to look forward, reasonably probable occurrences and developments are more important still; and so our talk ranged from current events, such as Hunter's recent loss, Rundle's operations, or Loubet's plans for a _rapprochement_ of the municipalities, to the coming American elections, the state of the labour world, and the health of the Queen. To the test of these general conditions, particular proposals were submitted; and though I had long known Pepper's private "hand," the skill with which he now played it was a revelation to me. At one and the same time he was laying the foundations of a dividend-paying business and of an administrative programme of which he and I were to be an indispensable part; and so, knowing more of some things than Robson, and more of others than Campbell, he set them one at another, coming in himself from time to time with an idea born of themselves five minutes before, but given back so cut and polished that it had the appearance of a new thing. I prudently said little save on an overwhelming certitude, but I think I encompassed it all and made my presence felt, now sweepingly, now as a mere deflection. I was now oblivious of all, save our conference. I seem to remember that at one juncture I must have spoken for getting on for five minutes, a feat unparalleled for me; but I knew my ground. It was of the academic Socialism and the newer kind, then just showing over the horizon, and perhaps better understood by those who like myself had gone through the fire than by any official. I was only interrupted once, by Pepper, when I mentioned Schmerveloff's name, the Russian social doctrinaire. "Ah yes, your neighbour," he murmured, and I went on....

Then suddenly I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past ten. I still had some minutes, and I used them for a sort of cadenza to whatever my performance might have been. Then, rising abruptly, I said I must be off.

"I must be getting along myself presently," said Pepper.

He came downstairs with me and saw me into my hat and coat. I saw his glance at my new topper, but he said nothing either about my appearance or my recent demeanour. Instead it was I who said suddenly, as we walked to the door, "By the way--you didn't tell me that that neighbour of mine was Schmerveloff."

He laughed. "Didn't I? Well, you ought to know who your neighbour is better than I do!" It was only then that he added, "Well, I think we've done the trick, Jeffries!"

I left him, and turned towards Swan & Edgar's. I had another trick to do now, though of what its nature might prove to be I had not the faintest conception.

III

As they had done three hours before, again our eyes met simultaneously. She had been sheltering in a doorway, but she advanced immediately, and without hesitation took my arm. I suppose she must have chosen our direction, for we had crossed to the corner of Lower Regent Street before I had as much as wondered where, at that hour of the night, we were to go. It was still raining; the flimsy umbrella she carried protected her soft grey hat, but not her skirts; and I did not wish to take her to any of the brightly lighted establishments of the Circus for two reasons--first, because I had only four shillings in my pocket, and secondly, because I wanted--well, say to distinguish. The west-bound buses start from the corner to which we had crossed, and it looked as if we should have to talk in whichever of them took her homewards.

"This one?" I said laconically, as a West Kensington bus drew up.

But she drew me away. "Let's go this way," she said.

I took her umbrella, and with her hand still on my arm she led me down Lower Regent Street.

If we had anything important to say to one another, it was extraordinary how we delayed to say it. We reached the offices of the F.B.C. without having spoken, and turned along Pall Mall East and into Trafalgar Square still without a word. And when presently she did speak, at the top of Parliament Street, it was merely to tell me that my hat would be spoiled if I didn't take my share of the umbrella.

"Then you might at least turn your trousers up," she added, as I made no reply; and I stooped and did so. We resumed our walk, stopped at the Horse Guards, and made our way slowly towards the Mall.

"Are you warm?" I asked some minutes later.

"Quite," she replied; and the silence fell on us again.

At last, somewhere near the spot where the Artillery Memorial now is, she did speak. It was a curious question she put, her fingers working slightly on my sleeve as she did so. During the past minutes a sense--I hardly know how to describe it except as a sense of protection--had begun to grow on me, the odd thing being that it was not I who protected her, but she me. Perhaps the perfect calm with which she had claimed my arm had begun it; it certainly now informed the very curious question she suddenly put.

"Are you happy?" she asked.

You may imagine I was a little surprised. Quite apart from the nameless reassurance that thrilled in her tone, some queer gage of fidelity, though fidelity to what I could not make out, the question itself was a long way out of the ordinary. Was I happy! Ought I not, from any point of view she could possibly have, to be happy? Newly married--sure of myself--wearing clothes the luxury of which was only an anticipation--fresh from a conference with the great ones of the land (though to be sure she could hardly know all this)--what else should I be but happy? It looked as if for some reason or other she had supposed I would _not_ be happy.... I spoke slowly.

"I wish you would tell me," I said, "what makes you ask that?"

She looked straight before her through the rain. "Why I ask that? It's just that that I wanted to ask you," she replied.

"It's just that that you----" I repeated after her, stopping, however, half-way.

Yet I felt somehow that that she had just uttered was no banal compliment. She was not thinking of the kind of felicitation that had been implied when she had sent Evie the teacloth. She had not asked after Evie, and was not, I knew already, thinking of Evie. And again I had that odd sense that she was protecting me, and would continue to protect me.

"Well, it's an odd question--the whole thing's odd, of course--but since you ask, I don't mind telling you. I am happy."

She turned under the umbrella eagerly, almost (I thought) joyously.

"You _are_?"

"_I_ am," I emphasised slightly.

But still she did not mention Evie. Again we walked. Then:

"You are? After all--that?"

Softly from the background of my memory there came forward what I conceived to be her meaning. It was a humiliating one, and I hung my head humbly.

"You mean after--poor Kitty?"

But it seemed I was quite wrong. "No, I don't mean that," she said. "Or at any rate only partly that."

"Then," I asked quickly, "will you tell me what you _do_ mean?"

In Billy's studio we had been positively straining at one another to speak; since then, free any time this last half-hour to say what we would, we had hung just as desperately back; but now came a sudden enough end both to straining and to reluctance. She turned to me; my eyes would have fallen before the gaze she gave me, but were compelled to endure it; and the lightning is not more instantaneous and direct than were the words that now burst from her.

"Tell me--you killed that boy, didn't you?"

I said you should have it soon. It has been a little longer than I thought. At any rate you have it now.

The remaining events of that evening are easier to set down than to account for. My difficulty perhaps is that I am trying to tell an extraordinary thing in terms that are inappropriately plain. Nothing, for example, would be simpler than to say how we stopped in our walk, presently resumed it, slowly passed the Palace and the Royal Mews, and in course of time found ourselves walking up Grosvenor Place. It is true that we did these things, but it is also true that they are all more or less beside the mark. I need not urge my point, how beside the mark they are, by comparison with the remarkable results of being asked by a woman whom you have known only slightly and whom you have almost forgotten all about whether you have killed a certain young man. Therefore if, as may very well be the case, you yourself have no experience on such a point, that is all the more reason why you should trust me to give, in my own way, the essence of an hour without parallel in my experience, and, I imagine, to be matched in that of few others.

As she had spoken I had stepped back, without haste, a pace from her, taking her umbrella with me. I was stepping back another pace, when my back encountered the iron railings, stopping me. Until then her hand had not left my sleeve. Now perhaps three yards separated us, she standing in the rain, I with her gimcrack of an umbrella. There was a lamp not far away; the veil of falling rain held and diffused the light of it, so that I actually saw her with more evenness of detail than I should have done had she stood directly in the light, one side of her face illumined, and the other dark; and probably my own face was not entirely lost in the shadow of the umbrella. Our eyes had met again, exactly as they had met in the studio....

On her soft floppy hat and over the shoulders of her three-quarters grey coat I saw the rime of fine rain gather. It became a sort of soft moss of rain, that gave her figure a faintly discerned outline of light. Though her wrists were damp and dark, and her skirts straight and heavy, I still did not think of passing her the umbrella; it is wonderful how many small things escape you when you have just been asked whether you have put an end to a young man's life. The rain came on still more sharply. I saw it gleam on the backs of her kid gloves....

It never occurred to me to wonder how she knew. I suppose I ought to have wondered this, but I gave it no thought. Instead, I was wondering why I had never noticed before what her eyes were like--why, indeed, I had thought them to be quite different. Had you asked me that morning what Louie Causton's eyes were like I should first have rummaged in my memory for who Louie Causton was, then have dismissed them as ordinary and a sort of grey, and so have missed a wonder. Grey? Yes, they were grey, but that is not saying anything. And perhaps after all it was not the eyes that held me. Perhaps the eyes were no more than rounds of crystal between us, pure crystal, hiding nothing. Better still, perhaps they were of that substance which, placed across itself, allows no light to pass, but, turned parallel, ceases to intercept. Formerly I had seen those tourmaline rounds of Louie Causton's grey eyes as it were transversely placed, opaque, riddling, mocking, impenetrable; now, quicker than the flicker of a camera-shutter, they had changed, and, for me, would never again change back. I had seen down into her soul. Her physical form, three hours before, had not been more openly offered to my gazing than was that measureless deep interior she showed me now....

And that she too had plunged to the bottom of my own soul, her question was sufficient evidence.

And now, as that vision of her spirit, stark and piercing as Billy Izzard's of her body had been, must abide with me for ever, there was no special need for hurrying matters. Though I had known it not, it was for that last stripping look that I had whispered so breathlessly to her over the screen; and she, unlike me, had known why she had whispered back. So, the thing being now done, our time was our own. As slowly as I had retreated to the railings, I advanced from them again. Once more I held the umbrella over her.

"Come," I said. "You're getting wet."

Again, without a moment's hesitation, she passed her hand under my arm, and we moved towards the Palace.

There are some supreme moments--they say the moment of violent death is one of them--in which all Life's obscurations are made instantaneously clear; but if my own supreme moment ought to have taken that form, I can only say that it did not. No sudden explanations of the hitherto inexplicable flashed through my mind. Afterwards, when a certain amount of imperfection had supervened between me and that perfect look, these explanations did present themselves, yes, in crowds, but not then. I did not ask why, knowing me for a murderer, she should still take my arm. I did not wonder how she regarded the matter from Merridew's point of view. I did not trouble myself about how she knew, nor, for the matter of that, whether she did know--for she had made no charge, had only put a question. I cared for nothing but that sweet yet terrible depth and stillness I had seen beyond the tourmalines of her eyes. Indeed, somewhere near the Palace, I suddenly found myself irresistibly longing to look into those eyes again. We were approaching another lamp. I stopped. Again I did not notice that I did so under a dripping plane-tree. I looked. They were still the same--flawless transmitters, accesses to the ether of her soul....

Again she put her question.

"You did kill that boy, didn't you?"

"Yes." (I could not have dared to lie to her.)

"Ah!"...

We walked on again.

And I know not what rest, akin to the longing of a weary spirit for death, I found in it all. Nor do I know whence came the special and unimaginable peace that filled me. For that peace was special. My marriage had been a different rapture; the dreams of the first days of my love had not been the same; and it was perhaps this that I had implored in vain that night when, stretching out among my swags and gargoyles, I had cried to Whatever lay beyond the marbled sky that, might I but be delivered from this body of an ancient death, my life should be a dedicated thing. And now, when I least expected it, I had it. Between me, a man who had committed murder, and her, the mother of a nameless child, something I knew not--something still and splendid and awful--had come into being. Do you wonder that, in the stillness and splendour and awe of it, my brain slumbered within me, so that though those grey abysses full of answers waited for me, not a question did I put?...

"Yes," I said. "You know I killed him."

And "Ah!" she said again.

You will not find it difficult to believe that when you have been asked the question I had been asked, you and your questioner are not on ordinary terms. Indeed--believe me--you are hardly flesh and blood at all. You become eyes and voices, and yet not exactly that either--you are parts of an immanent vision and speech. You will also see that to dare such a question is to dare to be questioned in your turn. Therefore, less as wanting the information than as doing her the reciprocal honour of putting her on the same stark footing as myself, I again sought those marvellous eyes.

"You asked me," I said, "whether I was happy. I told you.... Are you?"