THE CONSOLIDATION
I
The habit of sitting for artists leaves its mark on a woman. This mark
is the lack of mystery--the "looked at" appearance. But it has its
compensations. Chief of these are a physical unconsciousness, an
absence of coquetry, and a liberation of the mind so complete that a
sudden recall has all the effects of shock. Thus, a model posing for a
whole class of men has been known to faint because she has been seen
through the skylight by a "man" who mended the roof.
In some such state of liberation Louie, on an afternoon late in the
June of 1900, posed for Billy Izzard. It was in Billy's new studio, a
large upper room in Camden Town, opposite the Cobden Statue. The place
was so light that Billy had actually had to cut some of the light off.
The upper part of the far window, that towards which Louie's face was
turned, was darkened by a linen blind; the lower part of it was
shrouded with tissue paper. The whole corner was enclosed by a screen.
It was there that Billy did his etching. Behind another screen was
Billy's bed. At present Louie's clothes lay on it.
It was half-past five, but the best light of a changeable day. They
had had tea; the tray with the tea-things lay on the floor; and,
except that he grunted occasionally, "Raise your hand a bit," or "Head
a bit more round," Billy's absorption in his work was complete. He had
even worked through the short rests. During these intervals Louie had
crocheted. The crochet, only a little whiter than the foot near it,
lay on the throne now.
Louie was not thinking; you can hardly call it thought when any trifle
on which your eyes rest gives your mind its cue. Louie's eyes, the
only parts of her that moved, had rested on the crochet, and that had
brought Celeste into her mind. Celeste was leaving her; it had
something to do with phylloxera and a brother's vines; Celeste,
between two loves, must leave the boy and return to Provence. Then
Louie's eyes fell on the chair in which Billy etched, and presently
Kitty occupied her--Kitty, who liked her etchings in pairs, but
surmised that odd ones came cheaper. Louie had really no choice but to
do what she was going to do about Kitty. Jimmy must have somebody
during the day, and Louie, moreover, must have ten shillings a week
from somewhere. As a matter of fact, Kitty had agreed to pay her
fifteen shillings, and, in the intervals of looking after Jimmy,
proposed to type. Then, as her eyes moved to the screen round the bed,
she remembered that her boots must be resoled. They would carry
another sole, and it had been raining off and on during the greater
part of the day. And then something else brought little Jimmy into her
mind again.
For a wonder, she had not thought of a bigger Jimmy all the afternoon.
But on other afternoons she had. Billy sometimes remarked on a passing
tender colour; she always had to restrain a smile at that. Her tender
colour? There was not a particle of that looked-at superficies of hers
that, often and often, did not answer to a secret thought.... Perhaps
Billy, plain common-sense man, could have told her what those secret
thoughts really meant. Perhaps Billy, sensitive painter, could have
told her how sweet and pale and charming things must shun comparison
with the robuster stuff. As, in some delicate pastoral or _fete
galante_, art might turn its happy eyes inward on itself, so that the
putting on of a slipper and the nymph's hand trembling in a silken
fold and the promised favour of a smiling look hardly die because they
hardly live, so Louie too turned her eyes inwards. What she found
within herself still sufficed her.
"Better rest a bit," said Billy, looking up as he began to scrub in a
background.
Louie stepped down from the throne, cast a wrap about her shoulders,
and began to crochet again.
Again she hoped she was not doing an unwise thing in having Kitty to
come and live with her. But the flat was at last taken. It was a top
one in the New King's Road. A Board School now blocks out the pretty
view that Louie presently had at night, of the distant cupful of light
that was Earls Court, with the illuminated advertisement of the Big
Wheel appearing and disappearing as the structure slowly turned. Well,
Kitty's fifteen shillings would pay the rent, and the experiment would
be a good thing for Kitty also. Louie had furniture enough--in fact,
it would be a very good thing--all round.
"Come along--time," Billy grunted. "And I say, can you stop a bit
later to-night? I've got to go out, but if I don't finish this thing
to-day I never shall----"
Louie mounted the throne again, and again the silence was broken only
by Billy's stepping back from his canvas and forward again.
The light began to fail, and Billy began to work the more furiously.
"Give me just another ten minutes," he muttered, a brush between his
teeth; "this'll make some of 'em sit up, I think; it's _painting_,
this is!... But I don't know, perhaps I'd better let it go as it is;
it's a job, anyway. All right, Louie, thanks.... Right-o, Jeffries; I
didn't think it was so late."
The last words were spoken to the man who had knocked at the door and,
without waiting for a reply, walked in.
Louie had heard the steps on the stairs; perhaps--she could not
tell--she had already thought it unusual that the steps had not
stopped at the water-tap on the landing below that was the supply for
the two upper floors. Billy used that tap when he washed his brushes;
he was looking for his palette-knife now.
But Louie neither saw Billy nor heard his grumblings because the knife
was not to hand. She was looking past Billy, past the easel with the
study upon it, at the man who had entered. For one moment she was
wondering that she had not always known, not only that he would come
some day, but that he would come that day; the next moment she had
told herself that she had always known that.
Of her whole body, from the foot near the crochet to the last brown
hair of her head, her lips were the only portion that did not receive
him with a lightsome, quiet, fair, trusting smile.
Absurd ever to have supposed that they would never meet! Wise to have
known so perfectly what would happen when they did!
What had happened? Oh, every particle of her seemed to sing to every
other particle what had happened! Those pittings of her profession?
Oh, there they went, washed out, all out, in the baptism of a look!
Her fancies--those idle promises to pay drawn on a non-existent bank?
Oh, they had gone, and here was payment itself, the solid, actual
cash! She was suddenly rich. As she stood there, rich in seeing him,
rich in being seen by him, every one of those worthless bills was
honoured in full. She could have laughed at her past poverty. She
could have cried aloud: "Jim, I'm here--look at me--no, not my eyes
only----"
And he too seemed to be as she had always known he would be--singled
out, down to his very manner of wearing his clothes--among men.
Stupid, that of all those times she had thought of him she had never
once thought of him as in evening-dress! But that, in all this
perfection, was only one more reciprocated perfection: she so--he
so----
"Oh, Jim--_not_ my eyes only!" she well-nigh cried again.
But the lion's eyes never moved from her own grey ones.
"Right, Louie, I've finished," said Billy, looking up from his
palette-scraping.
And within herself she wailed: "Oh, _so_ soon? Must it be over
already? Must I sit for men all these days, and then, when _my_ man
comes----? Oh, a moment!... Well, he shall see me move--and I won't
look at him--I'll tell myself--oh, just one more fancy!--that he isn't
here."
She descended from the throne and passed behind the screen.
Was it strange that already, as she dressed in Billy's studio, she
knew that she would never dress in an artist's studio again, and made
of her fastening of hooks and strings a grave little
ceremonial?--(There! With that fastening yet another chapter was
closed; oh, trust her, there should be no reopening of it!)--Or that
she should have a little shiver, at the thought that he might not have
come? Suppose he had knocked at the door, and Billy had cried:
"Half-a-moment--slide, Louie--come in!" Suppose--but the tremor
passed. She had always known he would come; she had known it just as
she had known everything else about him. Again every fibre of her was
joyous. She was here on the earth--she, Louie Causton, daughter of a
pugilist and of a Scarisbrick, gardener, typist, artists' model, and
all else she might ever be--that she might know all about this man. To
have ever doubted it would have been not to deserve him. And here he
was, in the same room with her--he, beyond the screen, she behind
it--only the two of them, for Billy had gone down to the tap to wash
his brushes.
_Now_ what should she do?
No, she would not go out and join him; not as she now was; not a skirt
and blouse, after that fairness. Nor yet would she speak. Surely it
was for him to speak now! She had been speaking to him, singing to
him, all music to his eyes; there does come a point (she told herself)
when the woman ceases to do everything; he must speak now. She knew he
would speak. So she stood, upright, close to the screen, waiting.
He did speak, and like smoke another flock of fancies fled for ever.
They were the fancies in which she had tried to remember his voice. It
came, henceforth unforgettable, pure rest after her strivings. He too
seemed to be near the screen; only a screen between them; but the
phrases that were breaking their long silence were merely automatic.
He was saying something about seeing her presently; she heard him
pronounce the word "Piccadilly," and the most familiar image of
Piccadilly sprang up in her mind. "Swan and Edgar's," she was
whispering back over the screen.
"No, no." This came quickly, protestingly.
"At half-past ten," she whispered.
"Yes."
Then the dialogue was at an end. Billy had returned. Some moments
later she heard more words, a laugh, and the closing of a door. She
realised that he had gone.
Only then did she come out from behind the screen.
Billy was wriggling into his overcoat and muttering something about
being late. "Got to go and keep that chap's wife company," he said.
"Regular little Philistine, she is; I suppose that's why I go; can't
stand these blessed artists. I say, he'd no idea I'd a model, you
know--sorry."
"All right, Billy," said Louie demurely.... "Sorry!" So was not she!
"And I say, I'm afraid I shall have to pay you next time. I'm cleaned
out."
"It doesn't matter. Send me a steak in as you go out; I'll have my
dinner here."
"Right. Odd-looking chap that, isn't he? A good sort though. I picked
him up at the Langham one night. I took this place from him when he
got married."
"He lived here?" (What, another wonder?)
"Yes. Well, I'll send your steak in. Good-bye." Billy bolted.
He had lived there too! How ex--how entirely to have been expected!
Louie walked round the room, looking at the walls, the ceiling, out of
the windows, anew. He had lived there: read, eaten, slept there; what
a coinci--what a perfectly natural circumstance! Then, leaning against
the wall, she found Billy's study. Her eyes devoured it. She set it
against the throne, and then walked to where he had stood when he had
entered. She gave a rich, low laugh; she told herself what a fool she
was; but folly so lovely made life. Again she looked at the wet
painting. She had looked so to him----
She put the study back against the wall, but in another place. "That
study's mine, Billy," she muttered; "mine, not yours or anybody
else's, do you understand? You gave him my violets; he's welcome to
them; this belongs to me. Jim! Jim!" she murmured.
"Well, I suppose it's crochet now," she went on by-and-by. "Do you
realise, Louie Causton, that you've sat your last? And have you any
idea of what you're going to do instead? It looks as though Kitty's
fifteen shillings would come in useful after all."
As if otherwise she might have forgotten it, she repeated to herself,
over and over again, that she was to meet him at Swan and Edgar's at
half-past ten. At one of the repetitions--it was as she was cooking
her steak over the little gas-ring that, perhaps, had once been
his--it occurred to her why he had muttered that quick "No, no," when
she had proposed that meeting-place. She glowed, she laughed through a
sheen of tender tears. "Dear, dear one! _You_ don't think that corner
good enough for us, my sweet little outcast and me. Well, we won't
thank you; we won't belittle him by thanking him, will we, Jimmy?----"
But she did not promise not to look her thanks when she met him at
Swan and Edgar's at half-past ten.
Presently she pushed her plate away; she could not eat. She had felt
her bosom rise once more. It had risen as it had never risen for
anything or anybody save for the little Jimmy, and it rose, it seemed
to her, for a similar reason. For in her hands even his physical
safety lay. He was to be mothered too. Her unfelt arms were to be
about him, the milk of her protection to be his life. By his strength
he had thought to give himself to somebody else, but by his need he
was still hers. A gladness richer than she had ever, ever known
swelled within her. He, the great weakling--she, the strong one, to
cherish and support----
"Jim!" she murmured, smiling, uplifted, lost. It was as if his weary,
tawny head was on her breast.
And she was going to hear his voice again, at Swan and Edgar's, at
half-past ten.
She feared that her own emotion might have exhausted her ere ever the
hour came.
II
"Your hat will be spoiled if you don't take your share of the
umbrella," she said. It was a silk hat, and she supposed that silk
hats cost money. A fine, persistent rain was falling.
She thought that he answered that it didn't matter.
"Then you might at least turn your trousers up." Her own shabby old
grey coat didn't matter, but his trousers----
He seemed to be on the point of replying that they didn't matter
either, but changed his mind. He stooped and turned them up. She held
the umbrella while he did so, and then gave it to him again,
replacing her right hand where it had been--on his left forearm.
It was on these mere externals of him--his hat, his coat, his
trousers, his boots--that she had hardly for a moment ceased to feed
her eyes. Anything else might wait; for the present the stuff of his
sleeve was more to her than the stuff of his soul. She luxuriated
shamelessly in the smallest actualities of his presence; why, even
mirth stood but a remove away. His overcoat, for example: it was not
that old tawny one that had made him so much like a lion, but it was
an old one for all that; was she _never_ to see her man in a new
overcoat? Jim and his overcoats! But the rest of him was beyond
criticism. Certainly he must be making money. She wished she could
have called money to him with a wand, conjured it to him, as much as
ever he wanted. Had it not been that she would have had to take her
hand from his sleeve, she would have liked to step back to look at his
great church-door of a back again. Of his face she could see little,
but that did not prevent her looking until it would hardly have
surprised her had he flushed and said, "Don't gloat over me like
that." His hat was tilted down, the large peaks of his overcoat collar
projected like wings.
No, she did not want to know what he thought or felt; bother all that
part of him! When her thirsty senses had drunk their full, then would
be time enough for the other things.
They were walking somewhere behind the Horse Guards. Stretching before
them was the long, empty avenue of the Mall. She was looking at the
perspective of lamps and trees and drizzle, when suddenly he spoke.
Instantly all her faculties seemed to become one overgrown faculty,
that of hearing. Not that he was saying anything; he was, as a matter
of fact, only asking her whether she was warm; and she replied,
"Quite." She was almost amused that he should ask. His nearness warmed
her more than did her garments. Her hand thrilled deliciously on his
sleeve again....
Oh, the satisfaction of that, just that, after all her past
inquisitions into his soul!
But come to speech they must, and that very soon; and perhaps that
curious magnification of trifles made it easier. Indeed, half the
formidableness of the single question she wanted to ask him had
vanished already. To say to him, now or in a few moments: "Did you
kill Archie Merridew?" seemed somehow not very much more unusual than
asking him the time. Now that she came to think of it, even that
question seemed less important than another one: "Can you kill
somebody and still be happy?" She hoped in her heart that he could. It
would be his justification. Had it been an unrighteous killing, that
would have been another matter; as it was, she would have had him
unhappy only had he not killed. And, as he showed no sign of breaking
silence, she might as well ask him that now.
So, reluctantly turning her eyes from his face and looking ahead into
the haze of the rain, she suddenly said: "Are you happy?"
She wasn't surprised that he didn't reply at once. Of course men
didn't. They had their usual formalities to go through, of "Why do you
ask?" and so forth--a sort of routine before they could answer a plain
question. As he began to go through it now she made a little impatient
movement. She didn't want all that. Then he deigned to reply to her
inferior intelligence. Yes, he was happy.
"You _are_?" she said, with an exultant little leap.
Yes, he was; but again, apparently, he couldn't say a thing and leave
it. In the middle of more stupid, logical, masculine things (he seemed
to be qualifying his statement with something or other about his
conduct to Kitty Windus) she cut him short.
"Tell me," she said, repeating the little impatient gesture, "you
killed that boy, didn't you?"
They had been following the railings that divided the Mall from St.
James's Park, but she had stopped to ask her question. And she was
looking full at him now. But she could not see him very well; a lamp
and a plane-tree made all an obscurity of vague shadows and wet
reflections. But then he stepped slowly back, taking her umbrella with
him, and twice, as he held the umbrella unsteadily, the light came and
went on his cheek and chin; and then, as he took a step farther back
still, the umbrella bobbed on the railings, from the points of it came
little bright slivers of drops, and she found herself searching under
a lamplit sector of alpaca for his eyes.
The danger of asking, actually, a question you have asked, but not
actually, a hundred times before, is that your own mere familiarity
with it throws you out in your calculation. Now she found herself
suddenly hoping that what she felt to be working beyond the umbrella
edge--for she felt it rather than saw it--was not fear.
For, of course, she had miscalculated a little--had been stupid to
think that it was all as old a story to him as it was to her.
Obviously it would not at once occur to him that there had been
nothing to find out, but that instead the whole thing had been merely
enacted before her eyes; he was sure to be thinking that on some
point of evidence he had been betrayed. What sort of point that could
be, unless it had something to do with the black eyes that seemed to
haunt Kitty, he might know, but she could not guess; and all at once
she had a purely physical shrinking. She would rather not know. She
could string herself up to the thought of murder, but the bestial
details--no, not those. Those were his affairs. They were to be taken
for granted as things necessarily involved. And already she was on the
point of feeling herself a little disappointed in him. For in the
shadow of the umbrella her eyes had now found his; his head was a
little turned, and she saw the whites of them.
It _was_ fear. She, it seemed, could contemplate unafraid a sacrifice
that he quaked to have carried out.
But as, with another little falling of drops from the umbrella, he
steadied himself and stepped forward from the railings again,
additional light came to her. It was fear, but not that fear, that
haunted the amber eyes. The fear was of herself. He feared, not the
information she possessed, but her whole understanding and
condemnation. He feared lest she also should say: "It was murder; you
are here to be judged; me too, with all the world, you must account
against you; I set my mark too upon your brow."
And as he appeared sorrowfully to acquiesce in that also, nothing
could have seemed lonelier nor more touching than the quietly spoken
words with which he held the umbrella over her again:
"You're getting wet."
It was as though he told her that though he went outcast she must not
get wet.
Her answer was to put her hand under his sleeve again. They walked on.
But he had not answered her question. Perhaps he thought he had: to
all intents and purposes he had; but she wanted, not so much the word,
as that he should not withhold the word. He was walking slowly,
heavily, like a tower by her side; she had the sense of his fearful
overweight; she would give him time. They continued to walk, their
mingled shadow on the pavement as they passed each lamp creeping away
before them as if the beam of some lighthouse had had the sinister
property of obscurity.
Then, within a little distance of Buckingham Palace, she stopped
again. Again their eyes met under the wet, black mushroom of the
umbrella.
"You did kill that boy, didn't you?"
He had a slight start. It seemed to her that he even apologised for
having kept her waiting for the answer. Formerly she had seen
stratagems in his eyes; now, as he dipped the umbrella for a moment
and stood full in the light of another lamp, she looked only into
grave, candid depths.
"Yes," he said. "You know I killed him."
"Ah!"
Again her hand slid, as if of itself, back into its place. Again they
walked on. The next thing that came to her was another ridiculous yet
oddly precious trifle. She wore kid gloves; before, when she had
danced with him in an old frock of oyster-grey, she had worn white
ones; must she (she wondered) always wear gloves with him, as he
always wore old overcoats? She longed to take one glove off; yet
she--she, who had met Roy by the stile at night--for very bashfulness
dared not. The circumstance struck her; how was that? Gifts of
understanding for her he had: had he that gift too, the gift of her
own bashfulness back again? Up went her spirit on wings....
Yes, it was that--or for a night at least she would have it so. As
impossibilities are reconciled in a dream, so he seemed, by his mere
towerlike presence, to resolve in one large atonement, her own life as
it had been and the sweet and virginal and dear smiling thing that it
might have been. In no less a miracle than that she seemed to herself
to be walking. He could not only have kissed her; he could have had
her first kiss. He could not only have turned, as he did turn, leaning
against the pillar-box by the Equerries' entrance of the Palace, to
look at her again, but he could have received in return--did receive
in return--such a look as she knew he also could hardly have had the
like of before. And it made no difference--as in a dream such a thing
might make no difference--that he had a wife, she a son. Let him have
his wife, she her son; she could find room for wives and sons too.
To-morrow, perhaps, it would not be so; to-morrow might be like
yesterday again; but to-night--to-night--oh, the first garden was not
less trodden than these rainy streets, the Barracks, Gorringes', and
Grosvenor Road! Her hand moving again on his sleeve was telling him
even now, if he would but listen, that though man may not know that it
is not good for him to be alone, woman knows it, and maybe still
remembers it out of her knowledge of the place whence she came later
than he.
And he too understood now, for she was not so rapt but that she
remembered that he asked her, somewhere between a sandbin and a street
lamp, whether she was happy too, and that, looking up at him, she
smilingly whispered: "Yes, now." And she was not so rapt but that she
remembered telling him, flatly and with another happy and laughing and
triumphant look: "You can't prevent it!" But she was so rapt that of
much else that he and she said she had no very clear recollection.
Words that seemed unforgettable when they came had eluded her almost
in their own echo. But she knew that she gave him the liberty of
herself with no more reserve than she had claimed that of him. She
knew that because, later, but she did not know when, he muttered, in
some street or other, she did not know where: "God bless your boy."
Well, if she forgot things now, there would be many days to come in
which she would remember them.
Merely because it must be very late--she had no idea what time it
was--she grudged the going of the moments almost angrily. Already she
was becoming as hungry again as if she had not broken that long, long
fast. But she admitted that it was not unnatural that he should think
of his own concerns a little too, and want to ask her questions. She
began to answer the questions hurriedly, to get them over.--Kitty
Windus? Oh (she told him) he might leave Kitty to her; she'd answer
for Kitty!--His wife and her complete ignorance? (His wife's ignorance
appeared to be complete.)--Miriam Levey? (Oh, why would he not be
quick, and she so hungry!)--And then back to his wife again; what
about her? (he wanted to know). Louie wondered a little that he should
consider her to be his wife's keeper also, but she answered his
questions. That, she told him, was his private affair; but, if he
really wanted to know what Louie thought about it, Louie could not
conceive of a marriage with so huge a secret in it continuing
undisclosed. _Voila_; there he had it; and _now_ might she please be
permitted to enter into her own happiness again?
She was back into it, bathing in it again, almost before she was
aware. A minute before she had not known what street they were in; now
she saw the Chelsea Hospital on the other side of the road. On this
side was a row of houses; she knew one of them; a painter for whom she
had sat lived there; his studio was in the yard at the back. The
thought of a studio was all that was needed. She thrilled again.
No more studios! So poignantly did she burn that she could hardly
imagine that her glowing did not communicate itself. Studios, after
that beautiful, beautiful sketch of Billy's? Good gracious, no! She
was going to Billy's to fetch that sketch on the morrow; she would
like to see Billy deny it to her! And that poor, poor old oyster-grey!
Just because he had seen her in it once she had mooned over it, smiled
over it, sighed over it; but it could go now--she had a richer
memory!... Furtively during the last few minutes she had been working
off her right glove; it slipped from her hand to the pavement; but she
was afraid to stop. Let it stay; somebody would turn it over with the
point of a walking-stick in the morning and perhaps wonder who had
lost it.... She stole another look at him; her hand crept along his
sleeve; the tips of her fingers were on his wrist; her lips shaped his
name: "Jim!"
Then, unexpectedly, it rushed upon her in full measure. She knew these
streets familiarly; they were in Swan Walk now; and the thing happened
all in a moment. Again, during those anxious questions of his about
Kitty Windus, Miriam Levey, his wife, she had that sense of his
terrible overweight: now, passing a doorway, he suddenly reeled. He
began to sink....
In an instant her arms were about him. Not the unfelt, immaterial arms
of her mothering vision in Billy's studio, not that other breast,
offered but impressed, sustained him; she held him within her two arms
of flesh and blood, upon that firm, warm bosom that changed its shape
to his weight upon it--the bosom he had seen yesterday, white hives,
all their honey his.... She bent and kissed the shoulder of his coat.
Oh, if he might but faint, quite, that she might carry him somewhere,
or, if she could not carry him, stay with him where he was--she cared
not--rest by his side through an endless night! Her heart, yes, her
lips too, called him; a whisper might not reach him; she called him
aloud:
"Oh, come, come! Come, come!"
* * * * *
Afterwards she thought of it as a hail from a ship to another ship
across a stretch of water so narrow that it was all but a stepping
aboard. How could such a hail be a farewell also? They were not
passing; as they glided side by side together, either seemed
stationary. Other things, the whole offing of Life, were in motion;
these slipped past, as it were sky, shore, shipping; but for a space
he and she spoke from bridge to bridge. And he heard the hail too, for
he opened his eyes. Though they never looked on her again they did so
now, relinquishing all to her. Was there anything she had not known?
There was nothing she might not know--now----
By-and-by she had helped him to a seat on the Embankment and had made
him sit down. She took off his tie and collar; she smiled as he
thanked her. "That was absurd," he said.
Then he asked her where she lived.
It was over.
Well, perhaps more would have been more than she could have borne.
But when she sat at last alone in the hansom he had called, conscious
that she was wet to the skin and that her boots needed to be resoled,
she still had the image of the ships before her eyes, gliding together
side by side, with all else in quiet, relentless motion behind them.
She held fast to it. She could not have endured to think that of that
night's long wandering all that would remain on the morrow would be
yet another dream and a wet glove left behind in an empty Chelsea
street.
III
Louie Causton would have been more than human had she not frequently
thought, as her life became a moving from pillar to post again, that
there was an exasperating proportion of absence in her heart's story.
But at first she was not petulant. Some absences are brimful, as other
presences are mere vacancy, and, now that she no longer sat, she had
other things, plenty of them, to think of.
There was little money in the sale of crochet; there was not much more
in sitting in costumes hired from the Models' Club. From both these
things she quickly turned. Perhaps she turned from them the more
quickly because of Kitty Windus--for Kitty was now with her in the
flat in the New Kings Road, and the way in which Kitty, without
spoken words, paid over her weekly fifteen shillings, was in itself a
spur. Not that Kitty always spared her the words either. Two words at
least that she did not always spare her were "rise" and "permanency."
Often Louie felt all the amazement, and now quite without any leaven
of amusement, that she had felt when first she had entered the
Business School in Holborn; but she was not keeping Kitty (or Kitty
keeping her) either for love of Kitty or her own mere necessity. To
keep Kitty was part and parcel of that absence she was already
beginning to resent. It was merely safer to keep Kitty than to have
anybody else keep her. Besides, as long as she kept Kitty, she had
only to write a note, justifying it afterwards as best she could, and
two ships (so to speak) would come together again. She delayed to
write the note; none the less it was in her power to do so.
So (to turn for a moment to that moving background of Life in the
offing) the September of 1900 found her answering the advertisement of
a Bayswater seedsman and discovering the precise market value of her
old Rainham Parva training. But by the end of the same month she was
temporarily installed at the clerk's table of an exhibition of French
paintings at a Mayfair gallery, and glad of the job. Say (the question
is hardly worth going into) that it was the influence of the paintings
themselves that once more caused a manager to propose that Louie's
wages should be substantially increased, for a consideration; it
didn't matter; Louie, who did not now throw away jobs for nothing,
merely told the man not to be silly--than which, as it happened, she
could have done no better thing, for at the close of the exhibition
the manager, now looking upon her almost as a dear daughter, found her
another place, this time at a gallery academic both artistically and
morally, warned her against dangerous young men, and kissed Louie on
both her laughing cheeks. After that her French again served her turn,
for she entered the office of an illustrated weekly; or if it was not
entirely the French that did it, so much the luckier Louie to possess
even yet a frock that was a rest to the proprietor's eyes after a
succession of applicants in walking skirts and white muslin blouses.
This job Louie actually kept till June 1901; then an amalgamation took
place that threw her out of work again. Three weeks later, after a
severe trial of her temper by Kitty, she was a "carpet designer"--that
is to say, she coloured, in an upper room near St. Paul's Churchyard,
pieces of paper so minutely chequered that sometimes for an hour or
two she could not get the flicker out of her eyes. She made a grace of
retiring from this occupation as soon as she saw that if she did not
do so her employer would retire from the office of paymaster. After
that she was reduced to sitting again, in costume. Nothing else
offered. Jimmy must eat, Kitty's fifteen shillings be covered. The
female figure in "The Two-stringed Bow," which caused such a
(journalistic) sensation in the Academy of the following year, is
Louie. Chaff did not recognise it. Billy Izzard, who had seen the
costume at the Models' Club, did. He persecuted Louie to sit for him
again as before.
Of the Models' Club she was still a member, and she got on well with
the girls. Once she took Kitty Windus there, but only once; a
black-and-white man, knowing nothing of Kitty's pound a week, asked
her to sit to him as Miss Tox, in "Dombey and Son"; and Kitty,
presently reading the book, treated Louie for some days with marked
superciliousness. That came of making yourself cheap, her manner
seemed to say; and she reported Miriam Levey, whom she met near
Piccadilly Circus one day, as having said, "Vell, vat do you expect?"
Louie did not much like this meeting with Miriam Levey. She remembered
the Jewess's pertinacity and curiosity for curiosity's sake. Many such
meetings between Kitty and Miriam Levey might easily complicate her
own life.
There were two bedrooms in the flat in the New Kings Road. In the
larger one, that at the back that Louie shared with Jimmy, there hung
at first the sketch she had begged ("stolen" was Billy's word) after
she had ceased to sit. When Louie took this down one day and put it
out of sight, she told herself that she did so on Jimmy's account; but
perhaps those absences that she had to convert into presences as best
she could had something to do with it too. Perhaps, if she did not see
the thing for a time, its first freshness would return.
Sometimes she thought these absences really too bad; she began to
think so with increasing frequency as Kitty's fits of patronage became
no rarer. Really it didn't seem fair that she should be asked to bear
them. The least Jim could have done, since she bore them for him,
would have been to let her know that he still existed. She did not
much mind looking after Kitty, but it was a little too much that on
his part _all_ should be absence!
And that was why, with Kitty always at hand for her excuse, she did
not write to him.
In a word, the joy of bearing for him was becoming fainter in
proportion as the burden itself increased.
Then a piece of news with which Kitty came home one night added its
trifle to her smart. She was alone in the flat that night; Jimmy had
been in bed two hours and more, and Louie, after having folded his
clothes, cleared up his litter of toys from the floor, and tried to
read a newspaper, had turned low the gas, drawn up a chair to one of
the three windows that looked down on the New Kings Road, and sat
gazing out over the trees and houses and scattered lights that
stretched away to Earls Court. It happened that that night the
Exhibition was closing for the season; a firework demonstration was in
progress; and out of the little pool of orange light rockets rose from
time to time, falling again in slow showers of red and green and
white. If no cart was passing she could just hear the muffled
detonations.
She knew that if an impossibility could have happened, and Jim could
have walked into the room, sat down by her, and watched the white and
green and red rockets with her, that slight constant smart at her
heart would have gone; but now she told herself that it was not as if
she was young, with unlimited time before her. She was thirty-two, and
too much absence is not sustenance enough for thirty-two. But that,
she supposed, meant nothing to a man. Men did not appear to get old in
quite the same way. The man who had tried to make love to her at the
French picture exhibition was sixty if he was a day; sixty, and still
fiery; and apparently he had found her still desirable also. But it
was not for much longer. Women died with their beauty. Of course she
had her little darling asleep there; men had the comfortable theory
that women wanted nothing more than to "live again" (as they called
it) in their children; well, all that Louie could say was that she did
not agree with them. She knew one woman who wanted more. It might be
wicked and unnatural to endow Jimmy, as she had done, with a sort of
vicarious father, but Roy was gone out of her life--gone; to have
married him would have made more mischief than it would have cured;
and Louie saw no reason for not telling herself the truth about
herself. But a vicarious father who stayed away was altogether too
vicarious....
Well, well, she supposed that if a woman would have a man at all she
must put up with a selfish one.
He, of course, knew exactly what he wanted, and had got it; nor could
she say that he had not earned it--grimly. But now that he had got it,
what about somebody else who was helping him to keep it--somebody
called Louie Causton, who stepped in when she was wanted, took half
the burden off his back, and was presently sent about her business
again? (For she had remembered now the quite personal, preoccupied
questions, about Kitty and Miriam and his wife, that he had put to her
on the night of their long walk.) Oh, no doubt she would be there when
she was next wanted, to share with him the thing another woman ought
to have shared (but thank goodness the other woman had not!). It had
not in the least surprised Louie that his wife knew nothing. It would
have surprised her very much indeed if she had known anything. Jim
might humbug himself as he liked, but at the bottom of his heart (she
now saw) he knew better than to tell her. She was not the kind; it was
Louie who was that kind, and he knew it too. But there: she was
pretty, and men asked no further; give them hair and eyes and an
unlined brow and the rest could go hang. Heart and vision--no; courage
and devotion and the strength to bear--no; but twenty years, a curving
eyelash, and a bloom more quickly gone than the falling rockets
yonder, and ah, how they ran! But they didn't trust them. No, the
other sort was sent for then. And it was the business of the other
sort to be, always, as strong as they sometimes thought themselves.
The last rocket fell; the lights of the big wheel began to make
quicker revolutions; and Louie left the window and turned up the gas
again.
As she did so the electric bell in the kitchen rang. It rang again,
and then Louie remembered that the street door four floors below would
be closed for the night. She passed out on to the landing and
descended the stairs. It was Kitty. She had forgotten her key. Kitty
panted as they ascended again.
"How long have you been in?" she demanded, as she took off her hat and
coat in the little hall.
"All the evening," said Louie. "Have you had supper?"
"No, I haven't," said Kitty shortly, and then came her grumble. Why
hadn't Louie had the gas lighted? Fireworks indeed! And there Kitty
had been waiting for twenty minutes and more, thinking nobody was
in--anybody might forget their key once in a while, mightn't they?
Hadn't Louie forgotten hers not a week ago, and that not the only
time? Kitty had a right to forget her key sometimes. And there had
Louie been in all the time, watching fireworks! Well, what was there
for supper? And the fire almost out too; really, if Kitty paid for the
coals, Louie might at least keep the fire in!
Louie mended the fire and got Kitty's supper. When Kitty had finished
she cleared the little round table again, and by the time Kitty had
put on a pair of red bedroom slippers and turned up her skirt to the
blaze she deigned to relent a little. She admitted that it wasn't as
if Louie had known she was waiting in the street, but all the same it
was annoying.
"And now I've got a piece of news for you," she said, warming her
hands. "It's a dead secret, but I don't suppose Miriam would mind my
telling you. She's in for no end of a good job in a few weeks! But she
always gets good jobs. She has determination, Miriam has, you see."
Louie was standing by the end of the mantelpiece, stirring a cup of
cocoa. She only said "Oh?" Her own lack of determination was now an
old reproach.
"Ra-_ther_! Have you heard me speak of a Mr. Pepper ever? But no, you
won't have; you're always a bit sniffy about Miriam, you see, and that
doesn't encourage people to talk. Well, she's his confidential clerk
at the Freight and Ballast Company, but he's chucking that, and who do
you think with?--James Jeffries!"
She paused to see the effect on Louie, and then continued.
"Yes, James Jeffries! What do you think of _that_? They're going to
start on their own, in no end of a swell way, and Miriam's going over
with them. It's Mr. Pepper's doing, of course, and as Mr. Pepper isn't
exactly a nobody even where he is, you may bet your boots he won't
change for the worse! Oh, James Jeffries knows the kind of person to
hang on to! He's to be a partner, if you please, as good as Mr. Pepper
himself; how's that for greasing in? Friends of the mammon of
unrighteousness, I _don't_ think!"
Kitty had this way now of speaking of her former _fiance_. Sometimes
she so extended his name that it became "Mister James Herbert
Jeffries." And however Jim now "got on," his advancement would still
be, to Kitty, a magnification of her own superiority in those days
when she had had a pound a week and he nothing. She began to take out
hairpins and went on.
"Oh dear, I wish my brushes were here!" (Louie fetched them.) "What
was I saying? Oh yes, about Miriam. She's to have an office to
herself, perhaps, or at any rate she's not going to sit with the other
girls; and when I tell you it's in Pall Mall, you can judge for
yourself--not just a couple of offices rented, but a whole
building--what ho! The stone that the builders rejected if you like!
And she'll have her own extending-bracket telephone, the very latest,
and arms to her chair to put her elbows on, not like the typists! And
Mr. Pepper's most friendly with her--she takes down his conversations
with no end of swells! And I say, Evie Jeffries won't be half set up
over it all, oh no! Even _his_ office--James Herbert's, Miriam
says--is going to be perfectly scrumptious!"
Her head was on one side; her short hair, as she brushed it, hardly
reached farther than the sharp point of her shoulder; and Louie was
thinking of that spurious engagement again. And suddenly--this had
happened before, but never before with so keen a stab--the thought set
her raging.... She herself had been so near!... Her elbow caught her
cup of cocoa; it spilt, and ran in a little stream from the corner of
the mantelpiece.... So near! And once again she cried to herself that
_she_ would have known how to keep him, Roy or no Roy!... Kitty? What
could his courtship of Kitty and her bones have been? _She_ would
have shown him the difference! To have been so near and then--Mortlake
Road, Putney!
Suddenly there seemed to her to be a great deal to be said for
conventional morality after all.
For a moment her heart was full of hate--hate of Kitty, hate of Evie
Jeffries, hate of Roy, hate of herself. To have been so near!
But the sharpness of it died down to a sullen ache. In his affairs he
seemed to be going up, up; she had always known he would; and less
than ever might she expect to hear from him now. And he would take his
common little wife up with him. He might go anywhere, meet anybody;
but sourly she wondered what sort of a figure he supposed his Evie
would cut up there--would have cut at Trant or Mallard Bois? Oh, Louie
would dearly have liked to see her there, to have pointed to her, and
to have told Jim to his face that whatever ability he might have
seemed to be yoked with an unimaginable stupidity, since he had not
known instantly the one woman for him.
Well, there was simply no accounting for these things.
But if he was going up, Louie did not very much like the channel by
which she had received the information. She had known that Kitty saw
Miriam Levey; now she seemed to hear her thick voice again, "I _vill_
find out!" She was aware, too, that there was little love lost between
Miriam Levey and herself. She herself had encouraged Kitty in her
present attitude of "Mister Jeffries," but it only needed the Jewess
to propose the contrary attitude and in all probability there would be
a struggle between them for the possession of Kitty. She detested
Kitty; yet in order that Evie Jeffries might make an exhibition of
herself among the people whose equal Louie was, Louie had to put up
with her, bones and chilblains and all! Much he left her, didn't he?
Good gracious, yes! And it was about time he was told that flesh and
blood women weren't made like that!
Kitty, remarking that it was a shame to leave the now glowing fire,
had passed out of the room for a minute; she now returned, in her
slippers and nightgown. Her feet, she said, were still cold with
waiting on the pavement; she would say her prayers with them turned to
the fire. She knelt by a wicker chair, and set the red slippers on the
low kerb, their worn soles to the fire. Louie, still from the end of
the mantelpiece, watched her. At a slight sound she made Kitty turned
her head for a moment; then she put it on the cushion of the chair
again.
Yes, certainly Louie must have a wicked heart, or she would not have
looked on the kneeling woman as she did. She wondered what, texts
apart, Kitty could have to say to God. To pray--with her feet in a
warm place! Why, Louie mortified herself more for an absent man than
Kitty seemed to do before her Maker!... And even when she had stifled
the thought she still had no more than a negative compassion for
Kitty. She was not unsorry for her and her weakheadedness; beyond that
Kitty was not, or ought not to have been, her affair. What was her
affair was herself and what little remained of her youth. Kitty was
hardly more than a year or two older than she, but she looked a dozen
years older; Louie wondered whether her shoulder blades too would soon
resemble the set-squares in Billy's studio, whether her waist also
would seem a broken thing within empty looking folds....
Kitty continued to pray and to warm her feet. Louie, wondering what
her next snappishness would be when she rose from her knees again,
continued to watch her.
Then Kitty rose. She turned to Louie.
"By the way, did you brush that blue skirt of mine?" she said. "Oh,
very well, it doesn't matter now; perhaps I oughtn't to have asked
you; thank you; I can do it myself in the morning. Sorry I spoke."
Louie turned away.
These were the times when she could hardly tell what had possessed her
ever to have supposed that she would be able to keep watch and ward
over Kitty at all. Kitty was perfectly free to meet Miriam Levey or
anybody else she had a mind to meet. And why, she asked herself at
these times, should she not meet her? Where, hanging and such
moonshine apart, was the risk to Jim? Indeed, it seemed to Louie that
that story that seemed so to weigh on Jim was quickly becoming
altogether beside the mark. The whole venue of his difficulties was
rapidly shifting. What he had done had not been discovered and
probably never would be discovered; what he wanted now was, not to be
protected from remote and shadowy and nonsensical dangers, but to be
told how he was to be happy with the wife whom he had seen fit, in the
great heap of his wisdom, to keep in ignorance. Of course the remoter
danger need not be entirely forgotten, but this, or else Louie was
greatly mistaken, was what those scarce-heard questions on the night
of that long walk had really meant.
And, in that case, what the devil was she, Louie Causton, doing in
this gallery at all, with nothing of Jim but silence and absence, and
nothing but peevishness and petty tyranny from Kitty? Roy, it might
be, was still ready to marry her; Buck never ceased to importune,
sulk and implore; Jimmy, one way or another, would be to provide for;
and she knew now how little she could do for him alone. Even her
desire to "show" Richenda Earle had now passed. She wanted,
desperately wanted, all the things she persisted in rejecting. Why was
she becoming morose, disillusioned, devil-may-care? It was a familiar
question now, but as she undressed that night she asked herself again
what it all meant.
She answered herself that there was no mystery about it. She supposed
it happened to every woman. It meant, of course, the passing of her
youth.
But, her head on her pillow, she had her compensating hour. No need to
re-describe its kind; there was now added again that forced and
desperate illusion, of the unity of herself, her boy, and the man she
would have had his father. She knew she merely abused her fancy and
must suffer for it afterwards, but no matter; if it was a drug it was
a sweet one, and that it might stay with her a little longer she chose
uncomfortable positions that would keep her awake. She could hear
Jimmy's breathing across the dark room. Jim, Jimmy and herself----
It was against her own will that, at two o'clock in the morning, she
slept.
IV
It was his voice over the telephone of the Models' Club that broke the
long silence. Ten chances to one but the bell had rung in an empty
room, for, save for a woman who was washing the hall floor, Louie was
alone in the place. She unhooked the receiver. "Hallo!" she
called.... "Yes, this is the Models' Club.... This is Miss
Causton...."
At last!
He did not say why he wanted to see her; he only said that he wanted
to do so at once. His minimised voice, with its suggestion of
distance, seemed to her curiously symbolic of their whole relation. A
telephone was supposed to bring voices near, but far more than that
the smallness and the distance struck her.
"No, I'm afraid not," she continued to speak into the instrument, "but
I can give you dinner here. You know the address?... Yes, at seven....
All right...."
Seek him? No, she certainly would not seek him. He must come to her.
She could give him tea and chops. As she hung up the receiver again
she glanced at the clock over the little service counter. Eleven.
Eight hours.... She had waited for months, now she must wait another
eight hours. She could have faced the months again with more
composure.
Only to look at the advertisements in the papers had she come to the
Club that morning at all. Well, she was not going to answer that
clairvoyant's announcement she had seen in _The Telegraph_ now. Kitty
would ask her that evening whether she had been looking for work, and
would hold up Miriam Levey and her determination as an example; let
her; Louie couldn't be bothered with clairvoyants and their
advertisements to-day.
And Kitty little dreamed how near Louie had more than once been to
showing herself as determined even as Miriam. Miriam was not the only
one who might be "taken on" at this new Consolidation of Mr. Pepper's
and Jim's, whatever it was. There is such a thing, when a man doesn't
come to you, as a miserable, ignoble yielding to the ache to go to
him. There is such a thing as the willingness even to keep a door all
day for the sake of seeing him go through it just once. After a
certain time pride becomes a poor staff, and--but he was coming, in
eight hours. That was why she had refused to dine with him. Your pride
stiffens again when you have just been on the point of throwing it
aside.
She knew that she would be good for nothing for the rest of the day;
in that case she might as well go and see her father. She had money
enough for her bus fares; half-past one found her at the Molyneux
Arms.
Buck was in high feather. His name had been proposed, in the interests
of Church and State, as a candidate for the Borough Council; and the
chief plank of the platform which Buck occupied during the whole of
that afternoon, descending from it with the greatest reluctance only
when Louie vowed that she could not stay another moment, was that as
long as England had Queensberrys to make her P.R. Rules it didn't
matter what Radicals tried to make of her laws. Louie fondled his
silver hair; dear old dad! Then she made him drive her back to
Chelsea.
(Buck, by the way, was returned at the head of the poll, a few weeks
later, amid acclamations that might well have rendered him deaf in his
other ear also.)
Back in the Club once more, Louie set aside the best chop, and made a
tour of the place in search of the narrowest table. The one she chose
was so narrow that the backs of the two chairs she turned up against
it almost touched. Lightheartedly she rebuked Myrtle Morris, who asked
her whether she was expecting "a boy"; and she laughed as Myrtle went
off to tell another girl that "Causton was on the warpath." Her
warpaint consisted of a white blouse, low and perfectly plain at the
neck, and a navy blue skirt. She was waiting at the window for Jim
twenty minutes before he came.
She had schooled herself to a rigorous composure. She opened the door
for him and told him to mind the hall lamp, within an inch of which
his hat reached; and the hand she gave him was not gloved this time.
But she barely touched his hand; had she not two whole hours before
her? He put aside a cheap hanging of rustling beads for her to pass,
and then followed her into the large room on the left of the hall,
empty save for a piano and a few chairs, that was used for parties and
tableaux. Myrtle and another girl appeared for a moment in the
doorway; the minxes appeared to be waltzing, but they had come to see
who "Causton's boy" was; and as they sat down she asked him, as if
daring him to find any but the plainer meaning in it, how Billy Izzard
was. She exulted that she could say these things and he could not.
Then she was told that their chops were ready. They passed into the
next room.
The table--it was a flimsy card-table covered with a cheap traycloth
stiff with starch--accounted for all awkwardnesses and proximities;
again she found it secretly delicious to murmur a demure apology for
its smallness. She lingered over the eating of her chop merely because
her plate was edge to edge with his; she would manage badly if she
could not keep him at least two hours! Then, when she could linger out
her eating no longer, she asked him for a cigarette and a light--for
in the studios she had learned to smoke. He gave them to her. Her lids
hovered as he held the match; she wondered whether she should look
straight into his eyes or keep her lids downcast. In the end she did
both, looking at him first, then down. Whether he looked at her at all
she did not know; the first at any rate was a miss. She did not ask
for a second match (she had, she told herself, some shame); instead,
she put her elbows on the table and said, without further delay:
"Well, what is it?"
She nodded as he began to tell her; it seemed to be pretty much what
she had expected. She listened, or half listened; she would not have
sworn, had he challenged her, that her attention did not wander a
little. Her thoughts were ahead of his, but a little patience--he
would catch up; he would see presently that what his wife might think
or what she might not think (for that was what he was talking about)
was of less practical importance than he supposed. Naturally his wife
must be thinking this and that; marriage that left such a thing as
a--call it a private execution--out of the calculation might even turn
out to be a little difficult; but she might as well hear what he had
to say about it. She waited for the cropping up of the names of Miriam
Levey and Kitty Windus; they duly appeared. Mrs. Jeffries, it seemed,
wanted to see Kitty, and Miriam Levey wanted her to do so. Why they
wanted these things was not very clear, but possibly, if Louie was
giving him only half her attention, Jim was not saying all he knew
either. He still considered that aspect of the affair to be wholly and
solely the problem: but no doubt he would wake up by-and-by.
Suddenly she asked him whether he and his wife had quarrelled. He
shook his head that apparently, in spite of its stupidity, she must
still love.
"No--oh no."
"Well----"
And on he went again, still quite a number of leagues behind--the
complication of his former engagement to Kitty, Evie's sense of
unexplained things, Miriam Levey, her voracious curiosity, her
presence at this new Consolidation.
But here she interrupted him. "One moment. When do you start--this
Consolidation?"
He was toying with a knife; the little reflection passed over his
massive face as he turned the blade. "In a few weeks. Why?"
"You don't intend to take Miriam Levey over with you?"
He put the knife down with a little slap. "I do not," he said. Louie
had thought as much. So, no doubt, in spite of what she seemed to have
said to Kitty, had Miriam Levey.
"Well, go on; I interrupted you," she said.
He went on. It seemed to her that if nothing had actually happened his
overcarefulness was the one way likely to bring it to pass. Then, she
supposed, he would ring her up on the telephone again.
By this time she was thinking far more of Miriam Levey's empty chair
at the new Consolidation than she was of things unaccounted for
between her guest and his wife.
And as for those unexplained things (Louie neither knew nor cared what
they might be), she could only tell him now what she had told him that
night when they had walked together, that wives must either be wives
or not, must be told things or else be something less than wives.
Perhaps she had not put it quite so plainly to him as that before,
but that was what it had amounted to. Men with secrets ought to marry
the right women.... She stole a daring look at him across the table.
He was mumbling and twiddling a spoon now. His shoulders, bigger than
Buck's, were clothed in an exquisite iron-grey cloth; she wondered
whether he knew that she had kissed one of them that night in a
Chelsea doorway.... And then, as he paused and looked up, she spoke.
She did so almost curtly. If not telling hadn't answered, she said,
she could only suggest, once more, telling. As for Kitty, he might put
her entirely on one side; as long as she remained with Louie, Louie
would answer for her.
Then, for the first time, he seemed to show a gleam of interest in her
affairs. He asked her how she got her living, now.... Her pulse
quickened. Billy had told him, then; by "now" he meant now that she no
longer sat; and his eyes avoided hers. He coloured; apparently he
thought he was doing her an honour in wiping out all memory of that
discovery in Billy's studio. An honour! She could have laughed at him.
He little knew how she longed to tell him more--to tell him about the
oyster-grey too--to tell him that for her it was as long ago as that.
But no, he had seen the pearl----
And it appeared that his talk really had an object now; but, as usual,
she had seen the drift of it before he had. He was thinking of Miss
Levey's place, if his absurd delicacies would only allow him to get it
out.
"Would you accept it?" he managed at last to ask, sounding her
earnestly with his eyes.
"Steady, silly woman," she whispered to herself, brightly flushing....
But, glancing at him, she suddenly winced. Twice before men had
offered her posts, at more than their market value, and there had been
no colour in her cheeks as she had refused them; had she coloured now
at the quick thought that if _he_ had made such an offer she might
perhaps...? If so, there was mortification and despite in her colour.
Why did he offer her Miss Levey's place? Was it his wife again--always
his ninny of a wife? If that was so, so much the worse for him; it was
time he learned that if he got into a mess he must make shift to get
out of it again. There was a new little twang in her voice as,
suddenly looking into his eyes, she said: "You've no right to expect
that of me!"
And as soon as the words were spoken, she saw too where she herself
stood, and to what point beyond she was prepared to go. She knew now
that she would have taken his job, not at added wages, but without
wages at all. But to the humiliating thought that he imagined himself
to be doing her a kindness was now superadded that of his entire
ignorance that she might be making an attack upon his faithfulness at
all. Suddenly she saw herself merely wonderful to him--_she_
wonderful!--she, who had thought she could spend all her life up in
the clouds, be content to be magnanimous for magnanimity's sake,
virtuous for the mere love of virtue! Oh, if that was all, he needn't
think _that_ any longer! Wonderful?... What she wanted was not
wonderful at all, oh dear, no: merely something common, coarse,
filling; nothing more wonderful than that.... Wise mother, to have
known that that was the end of it all, and to have taken, long ago, in
Henson's studio, the short cut! She did not even try to check a wild
little exclamation....
And he evidently saw something too, though what, as he blundered
deeper, she did not stop to inquire. He gave a groan. "Poor woman!" he
said compassionately.
He might just as well have set a spark to a fuse. There broke from her
a peremptory cry.
"Not that, Jim--that's the one thing I will _not_ bear--I will _not_
be called 'poor woman'----"
And the rest now had to follow. It was the sum of her broodings,
resentments, hatreds, dreams, desire, despair. Evie, him, herself--oh,
it was not her fault if he didn't see now how the three of them stood.
He knew only too well what he wanted: what Louie wanted she also knew
only too well. Except to offer her a job that would save him even the
trouble of ringing her up on the telephone when her help was required,
had he ever, until this moment, looked at the thing from her point of
view? He had not. She would help him still; but if their ships must
part like this, at least no false tidings should pass from bridge to
bridge: he should know exactly what it was he asked, and why she gave
it! She began to speak rapidly, uncertainly, but sparing him nothing.
Perhaps, after all, she said, his wife would understand; he had only
to tell her that her husband made away with her sweetheart; perhaps
she could bear it; if she couldn't well--he knew what was his for the
holding up of a finger....
Then, as suddenly as she had begun, she stopped. Her voice dropped.
"I've had no luck," she said, with quiet bitterness. "I'm out of it,
and there's no more to say. Give me a match."
And then she rose. He might sit there if he liked.
He rose too, and they walked down the room in silence together. The
bead screen of the hall parted and tinkled together again behind the
great church-door of his back. Without a word he took down his coat
and, under the coloured hall lamp, hoisted himself into it. And then
he looked at her.
Already in her heart she knew that that look was the end. Her offer
had been rejected. Whatever else might happen, she, Louie Causton,
would never come between him and his wife. The woman who had those
eyes would keep their looks; had it been Louie's fortune to have them,
she would have kept their looks. He was a plotter, but not of amours;
a carrier through too, but not of intrigues. So grave an innocence was
his that probably he didn't know that his look told her all this; if
so, it was final indeed.
So she took her dismissal, and then, with her hand on the letter-box
of the door, stood gazing meditatively on the ground. She had wanted
to be wooed; failing that, she had once more brought herself to woo;
and this Joseph had gravely repelled her.
At last she looked up.
"About what you were saying--I mean that place of Miss Levey's," she
said. "I don't think it would do--not now."
The man who could plan a murder but not an affair looked humbly up.
"Why not?" he murmured. It was as if he said: "I don't remember that
meetings of ours in Billy's studio; I forget this too. You see how it
is. Your taking the job would make no difference."
Slowly she shook her head. "I should be seeing you," she said. "It
wouldn't do. Good-night."
She saw that she had missed even more than she had imagined.
And yet, before Christmas came, she was at that self-same
Consolidation. In October a lofty refusal; in December a creeping back
again with her tail between her legs. Where, she asked herself, was
her pride now?
The answer was that that had been in October, and this was December.
When she told Kitty that she was succeeding to Miss Levey's place
Kitty had certain things to say about treachery and broken
friendships. She said them at some length, and then remarked that
after that of course Louie could hardly expect her to stay with her.
"You never liked her," she said, as if not to like Miss Levey was an
offence in itself. "And I know you tried to keep me from seeing her.
Oh, you think I don't notice things, but you never made a greater
mistake; I could tell you things that would surprise you! You and
James Jeffries have got some game on; don't tell me he didn't give her
the push; Evie and Miriam both say so; oh, you're a deep one, Louie
Causton! First you come between me and Miriam; and then that day your
father came and I was asking him about black eyes and he told me you
could have one _without_ having one till you came to blow your
nose--oh, _I_ watched you! And then to go worming about till you got
Miriam fired and then bag her job yourself! Thank goodness, some
people have better ideas of friendship than that! I have, for one.
Never mind the bit you owe me; you can pay Carter Paterson with it and
we'll call it quits. Perhaps it wouldn't be troubling you too much to
ask you if you knew where the luggage labels are?"
So Louie let her go. The tract she received by post on the following
day: "God's Eye Everywhere, or No Sins Secret," she dropped into the
fire. Even if Kitty really was groping blindfold on the track of that
stale old private execution, Archie Merridew didn't matter now. The
question had already entered the stage of blank fatality.
V
Louie did not succeed to Miss Levey's chair at once. Somebody else got
that, who made room for somebody else, who made room for Louie. And
her arrival at the Consolidation appeared to be the signal for Jim's
almost immediate departure from it--that is to say, she saw him for
three weeks, then missed him for some days, asked (in another week or
so) a question, and was told that a fall of some sort, supervening on
many weeks of concentrated work, had necessitated a trip to Egypt. She
hinted that she would like to know what his fall had been, but nobody
seemed able to tell her. As a matter of fact, she never knew. It was
merely an act of spite on the part of the stars against herself.
The ordeal by absence began again.
This time she was able, somehow, to endure it. She always remembered
him when she passed a shipping company's office, with a model of a
liner in the window and pictures of palms and pyramids and a sphinx
not altogether unlike himself looming up out of the tawny sand; but at
other times she well-nigh forgot him for whole days together. She
could hardly question her immediate superior, a Mr. Whitlock, about
him, and probably Mr. Whitlock could not question Sir Julius
Pepper--for Mr. Pepper was made a knight in the new year. Sir Julius
had altogether too much _nous_ and urbanity to be questioned; he
asked, not answered, questions. Such an indiscretion would have
stamped Mr. Whitlock himself as a man of a barbarous mind.
The place itself, its plate glass and marble, its gilded lifts and
high galleries and lofty central dome, its floes of desks and counters
and the tessellated floors over which rubber-tyred trollies ran to the
strong-room every night--astonished Louie. What had been consolidated,
who the men had been who had reconciled interests so great that the
mere overcoming of their mass and inertia must have been accounted a
wonder, she never really knew. Perhaps nobody really knew; perhaps not
so much men as forces had accomplished that task. In some of its
aspects the concern was a huge amalgamation of mercantile companies,
mostly railway and shipping; in others it more nearly resembled a
Government Department. But she knew that Jim knew all about it. Jim,
Mr. Stonor (Mr. Whitlock's junior) told her, and Sir Julius, had
planned the whole enterprise. Acting alone, Mr. Stonor said, Jim might
have done the work and then have been shouldered out of the rewards by
such bustling men as Robson, of the Board of Trade, George Hastie and
Sir Peregrine Campbell, and others to whom Louie had lifted up her
eyes when she had kept the appointment-books for the photographer in
Bond Street; but Sir Julius had seen to that--trust Sir Julius! Sir
Julius could cut a throat smiling with the best of them; if Jim was
the genius, Sir Julius was the impresario of the enterprise. And
by-and-by, from the frequency with which Sir Julius and other
potentates said, when puzzled: "What d'you suppose Jeffries would do?"
or "Why the deuce isn't Jeffries here?" Louie came to much the same
conclusion.
At first she was set to work with twenty other girls who, each sitting
under a porcelain-shaded incandescent that burned all day long, tapped
typewriters in the back part of the building that looked down on the
white-tiled well; and for some weeks it was a question whether she
kept her job or not. For she was dreadfully inefficient, and daily
expected a reduction to the level of the girls who, with rigid
"dolly-caps" clamped round their heads, manipulated the rubber worms
of the big telephone switchboard. But again her improved French served
her turn. Miss Lingard, who sat in Miss Levey's chair behind a screen
twenty yards away, was absent one day; Mr. Stonor haled Louie off to
Sir Julius's room; and Louie, following Sir Julius and a Frenchman
from one to another of the spring-roller maps with which the room was
lined, took down in English short-hand a conversation in French about
the boundaries of some concession or other. It was a badly botched
job, but it was initialled and passed; and Sir Julius, who did not so
much open doors and place chairs as allow it to be discovered that
doors were opened and chairs placed exactly when they should have
been, looked at Louie, thanked her, and presently sent for her again.
One night she had to wait on him after dinner at an hotel, to make
notes of certain conversations; and perhaps Sir Julius noted the
little dipping of Louie's mouth when she was summoned from the
ante-room where she had been kept waiting. She wondered whether he had
expected she would turn up in a dolly-cap. A little after that he
asked her out to dinner, without any business excuse at all. Presently
she was wondering whether she would have to walk out of the
Consolidation or else to tell Sir Julius Pepper not to be a fool.
It never came to that; exactly how near it was to doing so, Louie
never knew. It was her Uncle Augustus of all people who saved the
situation. His name came up; Louie could not restrain a sour little
smile; and "Do you know Lord Moone?" Sir Julius asked. "Oh yes," Louie
replied. That was all. Sir Julius's charming smile never varied. But
the case was altered. Amanuenses of sorts are one thing, ladies with
private information about the peerage another. Perhaps Sir Julius was
a little of a snob. At any rate, he did not allow his little
gallantries to interfere with business.
So Louie became a quite superior writer of Pitman's shorthand. The
weeks passed. Jim still remained away.
Nor had she any news of Kitty Windus, of Miriam Levey, nor yet of Evie
Jeffries. She still, however, remained good friends with Billy Izzard.
It was from Billy that she heard, one night in April, something that
filled her with a vague and ineffectual trouble.
She had gone up to his place in Camden Town, intending to spend an
hour or so with him; but five minutes was all the time Billy had to
spare for her. He was just off to Victoria to meet a fellow, he said;
if she was going that way they could go together; and she needn't
think he was going to leave her in the studio to steal his sketches.
"One of our heroes just come back from South Africa, a fellow called
Lovenant-Smith," he said. "Coming?"
"I'll go with you as far as Charing Cross," said Louie.
Before she left Billy at Charing Cross she had learned quite a lot
about his friend, Mr. Lovenant-Smith. There was nothing especially
heroic about Roy's homecoming; no doubt his work had been useful, but
it had not been fighting; for a year and a half he had not left Cape
Town. He had now come into money, and was handing in his papers; he
would hunt and manage his estate somewhere down in Shropshire. "I
shall go and stop with him," said Billy. "I only hope his horses are
better than that old yacht he nearly drowned the pair of us in." And
at Charing Cross he left Louie.
Roy was back home, then.
Well, it made not one atom of difference. Jim away was all to her, Roy
in England nothing. No doubt it was wicked.
So much the worse for Louie.
Then, not a week later, Jim returned from Egypt.
But he returned only to go away once more, this time to Scotland. She
saw him, for just one moment, coming out of Sir Julius's room. He was
very brown, but much thinner, and he had a new overcoat. He went
straight on to Scotland that day. Mr. Stonor said that he intended to
stay there for the rest of the summer. "Overwork, of course," said Mr.
Stonor.
So yet another absence in her story of absences began.
She filled it chiefly with work. She rarely got home before ten, and,
save on Saturdays and Sundays, had to leave Jimmy entirely to the
young woman who had succeeded Celeste. Billy had left town, and had
probably gone to stay with Roy in Shropshire. Of Councillor Causton
she now saw little. She wished she could save more money. Jimmy was
now five and a half years old.
Then, in October, Jim returned from Scotland. Louie half expected that
it would be she who would have to leave now, but this did not happen.
Not that she saw much of him; he did not come until eleven, and went
home again for tea. Sometimes, after he had left, she or Mr. Stonor
had to ring him up at his house in Well Walk, Hampstead; for the rest,
he remained in high seclusion. She was glad it was so. A half absence
such as this had not all absence's pangs, nor was his half presence
too much perturbation; she could take a command with calmness, and she
had nothing but commands to take. She knew by this time that he had a
second child, a little girl, and that seemed definitely to close and
bar the door against any wild and lawless hopes she might ever have
entertained. And so things went on until early in December.
The thing that entirely changed their course may have seemed an
accident to Jim, but a little reflection made it plain enough to
Louie. She had not seen Evie Jeffries since that afternoon when they
had met at the step of the bus opposite the Adam and Eve; and Evie's
whole face and manner gave the lie to the story she told when, at a
little after three o'clock one afternoon, Louie came upon her in the
counting-house of the Consolidation itself. Near the table with the
calculating machines Louie heard a clerk whisper: "Mrs. Jeffries!"
Forty pairs of eyes were furtively watching her over desk-rails and
glass screens. Some of the clerks even made errands in order to get a
better view of her. If she wanted her husband she had only to ask to
be taken to his room at once, but she stood, a slender figure in new
black furs, by a waiting-room door. Then, seeing Louie, she almost ran
to her.
"Oh, how are you?" she cried, in an acquired voice, touching Louie's
hand then dropping it again. "Really, this place almost terrifies me!
I came to fetch my husband home to tea--the car's outside--but of
course I know I'm early. I'd such a lot of shopping to do, but I got
through it quicker than I thought. Well, how are you?"
It seemed to Louie that she did not do it very well; the manner of the
_grande dame_ was the last thing she ought to have attempted. As Evie
put up her hand as if it held an invisible quizzing-glass, Louie
wondered whether she had come primarily to see her husband at all.
"Really, this is stupendous!" she said. "I wonder if you could show me
round--that is, unless I'm interfering with your duties? Do tell me
what these things are!"
They were the mechanical calculators; her comment on them was: "How
quaint!" Followed by eyes, Louie took her to the lifts; she said they
must have one like that put into the new house they had taken in
Iddesleigh Gate. "It used to belong to Baron Stillhausen--you've heard
of Baron Stillhausen, the famous diplomat?" she said. From the lifts
Louie took her to the department where the girls in dolly-caps pulled
at the snaky telephone plugs. "Oh," she exclaimed, "so _this_ is where
you talk to my husband in the evenings from, is it?"... Louie had a
little start.... She answered, however, that the private line was in
another place, and led the way. No, Evie Jeffries oughtn't to attempt
this kind of thing; her touch was too heavy. She told more about
herself than she ascertained about anybody else. As they left the
private line Louie somehow had the impression that Evie Jeffries was
counting the paces from Louie's chair to her husband's room.
She returned to her own place slowly. She wished Evie Jeffries had not
come. Her coming seemed all at once to have diminished Louie's
composure; it was as if a closed question had been clumsily opened
again. "Where do you live? I should like to come and see you," Evie
had said, as they had parted at the door of Jim's room; and that was
odd, since for quite a number of years Evie Jeffries, had given no
sign that she wanted to visit her. Kitty Windus, yes; Miriam Levey,
yes; but she had not wanted to see Louie Causton. But she wanted to
see Louie now, and had come that afternoon, Louie was now convinced,
expressly to see her. Why? Had Jim been talking? Had Kitty and Miriam
Levey been talking? Louie did not know. She only knew that she had
been settled and at peace and was now so no longer.
And through it all shone an unquenchable recollection--the recollection
of how she had once stumbled upon Evie Soames, not in wonderful furs,
asking for her lordly husband, but dressed in a skirt and blouse,
cheek to cheek in a dark back room with a fancy-stationer's son.
Evie would never forgive her that discovery.
With all the elasticity gone out of her, she resumed the work she had
left half-an-hour before.
But as she lay in bed that night in her little flat, Louie ate her
heart out again. She hated Evie Jeffries. She had remembered, too, an
old, old slander--the slander to know the truth about which Kitty
Windus had come to the Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. Was it that that
had brought Mrs. Jeffries to the Consolidation now?
Louie tossed and tossed. Oh, she cried vindictively, if it only _had_
been so.... But to have to submit to the indignity of Evie's jealousy
and not to be able to give her grounds for it! And Mrs. Jeffries
wanted to see her flat! Well, she should be welcome. Louie would
hardly be at the trouble to lie about things, but every stick of
furniture in this place in which Jim had never set foot might
silently lie for her if they would! Would that be to drag Jim in?
Well, let him be dragged in; a woman with a husband like Jim, to be
jealous! Why, with Louie ready and glad to lose her soul for him, he
was the very egotist of faithfulness! He could not be virtuous without
damning Louie with his grave and candid looks! She could almost have
laughed at him. When all was said, such virtue was a byword, and the
story of Joseph a thing for a quiet smile! Then Louie's laugh became a
cry aloud, that woke Jimmy. Jimmy went to sleep again, but she was no
calmer.
Bitter as spurge was that old story of hers now, and bitterer still
the only moral lesson it now appeared to her to have. Oh, no doubt
there was a deal to say for their conventional morality, but a pretty
moral lesson it was, after all, that you repented of a history with
one man only when it forbade a second history with another! And she
swore again that that first history should not have stood in her way;
more, far more than that was his own headstrong virtue, and perhaps
that was not all either. She had been born for him, she knew it; he
had had never a secret from her save those large open secrets that
scarce a woman shared with a man yet; his hands, that could take life
for love, were made to hold her. She knew it in her soul.... But huge
as it was, he didn't see it. He allowed a pretty face to blind him to
it all. "Oh, come, come!" she had called to him on the only night, of
all those nights, when he and she had walked together; and his answer
had been to take himself away. When she had kissed his shoulder she
had merely kissed the spot where another woman's head had lain.
Oh, if that slander _could_ only have been true!
She looked at, and almost tossed aside unread, a letter that came for
her in the morning. Not for a single moment had she slept, and she
wanted no letter from Roy--for it was from Roy. Still she might as
well read it. She did so.
Billy Izzard was with him; it had come out that Billy knew her, and he
wanted to see her. "I've come back for you," the letter said, "and I'm
not going to let you go this time. Do write when I can come and see
you. Off out now, but do write." She threw it into the fire. Marry
Roy? She would far rather commit another sin than such a reparation.
The trouble was that she could not commit the sin.
That morning she was sent for by Jim. As she turned the handle of his
door she was ready to make a bet with herself about what he wanted her
for. She was not mistaken. He wanted to thank her for showing his wife
round the day before.
His wife--always and for ever his wife.
"If you feel that you must----" she said, biting her lip with
humiliation and passion.
"It's merely----" he rumbled heavily on....
As if she needed to be told what it "merely" was! If he cared to hear
it _she_ could tell _him_ what was "merely" the matter with his wife!
"Oh, must you?" she said, quivering under the torture. He was playing
nervously with a pen. "Must I what?" he said, not looking up.
"Must you do this?"
He looked up. "Shut the door," he said. "Now----"
She listened to him almost scornfully. Again harping on that informal
execution, as if he had been right and not right, and as if it now
mattered one straw whether he "told his wife" or not! He was saying
something about a doctor; the doctor, Louie gathered, had said she
mustn't have another shock; what had Louie--always and for ever
Louie--to say to _that_? Louie clutched at her skirt with both hands.
"Don't you know?" she said, clenching the skirt hard.
"I do not."
"Then ask me again and I'll tell you," she threatened him.
"I do ask you."
Well, if he would have it.... "She's jealous," said Louie.
The smile that stole slowly over his face set her almost beside
herself. Even Potiphar's wife was probably not smiled at. Louie cut
short the easy words that accompanied the smile.
"Then if she isn't, why does she want to come and see me at my home?"
she demanded.
With quite remarkable clumsiness he pretended he had known his wife
wanted this, and smiled again. She stamped on the ground.
"My good man----" she broke out wildly....
What she said she did not remember very clearly afterwards. It was
spoken less to him than to ease her own breast. With nothing to give
her, he still could not hold his tongue nor restrain that smile when
she told him his wife was jealous. Jealous?...
Yes, and with a jealousy that could now never pass away! For, out of
absences, silences, refusals, virtues, smiles, everything, Louie had,
after all, secured something that all the smiling in the world could
not take away. She _had_ the secret he had feared to share with his
wife. She _had_ the answer to every riddle in his riddle-haunted
eyes. His wife _had_ grounds for her jealousy, after all, had she but
wit enough to know where to look for them. But she too was hopelessly
behind. She too was smelling at cold scents--telephones and visits to
flats. She suspected a gross infidelity, and never dreamed of the
existence of one so fatally searching that the other would have been a
mere incident by comparison with it. Little dullard, how should she?
Her conception even of jealousy was as limited as everything else
about her; a call or two on the private wire at night, and she was
found asking questions at the Consolidation the next day.
And suddenly Louie saw--fool that she had been not to see it
before!--why Evie Jeffries wanted to come to her flat. It was not to
see the place and its furniture. It was to see Jimmy.
Oh, if her boy could only have had eyes like a young lion!
VI
When Kitty Windus had come to Mortlake Road and had refused to sit
down until Louie had told her the truth about the wanton slander that
had linked her name with Jim's, Louie had dismissed the matter with
amused contempt. But now there seemed something rather terrible in it.
Its author's stamping-out notwithstanding, for Evie Jeffries it
appeared still to live. What had brought it up anew Louie could not as
much as guess, but there it seemed to be.
"So that's it?" she muttered to herself. "In that case I may certainly
expect to see you again soon. You won't say anything to your husband;
he'd only smile and disbelieve his eyes and ears if you did--his
powers that way are really tremendous; but you'll probably go to
Miriam Levey, who's rather a gift for these things, and Kitty'll back
her up, and you'll make out your case one way or another. Very well.
When the water's troubled there's the best fishing. _I'm_ not above
certain things now; good gracious, no! I'll find a reason for ringing
him up to-night, and if you go to the telephone yourself so much the
better. And you'll be round to see me at my flat before very long."
Evie delayed to come, but Louie knew the reason for that. Jim was
moving into his great new place in Iddesleigh Gate. That would take a
little time. Well, there was no hurry. When she did come Louie would
be ready for her.
Did she still hope, if those waters could be sufficiently troubled,
for a catch? Was she in her heart now as resolved to wreck the peace
of Jim's household as formerly she had been to preserve it? She could
hardly have answered the questions herself. It was Evie, not she (she
told herself), who was going the right way to make a mess of things;
nevertheless, she had only to remember Jim's smile to feel the tigress
stretch itself within her. The loved fool! Could he go all lengths for
love without thinking that a woman might do the same? Louie could not
kill, as he could, smoothly burying the consequences afterwards, but
she could do other things; and she was not sure that she couldn't kill
too. Ten words, it appeared, would do it. Jim, who did not fear
murder, feared those ten words; well, men feared one thing, women
another, that was all. She had only to open her mouth where Jim kept
his shut.