PART II

VERANDAH COTTAGE

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?"

You have learned what she was; to what you already know I will add one

or two things I picked up later. I wish to show you what elements she

had to make happiness out of. She did fairly well out of her sittings.

Ordinarily she made as much as two pounds a week, and she made more

still when she was engaged for an evening class. To this were to be

added the small sums she made by her crochet-work during her short

rests. (Evie's teacloth had been made during the rests.) When she did

not crochet, she made garments for her boy. She rose daily at seven,

dressed her boy, breakfasted with him, and at nine o'clock brought him

out with her. They walked a quarter of a mile together to her bus, where

the child was met each day by a guardian, an old governess she trusted.

She kissed him, and blew him another kiss as the bus turned the corner.

He always waited with the old governess for this, but sometimes other

buses intervened, so that she went without her last glimpse of him. Then

she sought the studio where she happened to be engaged. There she posed,

crocheted, posed again, lunched, and once more posed. She usually

reached home again at eight o'clock, but when she secured evening

sittings it was eleven before she got back. By that time her boy was in

bed. She dressed him well, fed him well, told him tales, and bought him

tops and toy soldiers. She paid the governess ten shillings a week.

Sundays were her heavenly days. If they were cold or wet, she spent them

in playing with the tops and soldiers on the floor; if they were fine

she took him out on to the commons of Clapham or Wandsworth, or to the

Zoo, for which her employers gave her Sunday tickets. She had saved a

few pounds, and was adding to this sum by shillings and half-crowns,

against the day when she would have to send him to school and start him

in the world. This was her life.

And when I asked her if she was happy, she said, in a voice little

above a whisper, "Yes--now."

Then, with another deep, clear look, she added, "I think I have all the

best of Life."

It did not occur to me just then to wonder what she meant by that "now."

I was pondering her last words. All at once, on a sudden impulse (though

I was pretty sure beforehand what her answer would be), I said:

"He left you?"

Her answer was supremely tranquil and unaffected.

"Yes--as far as he was ever there to leave. It meant nothing--a

folly--merely stupid--it had no significance whatever. I've no grudge

against him. He didn't really wrong me. It hardly mattered, ever--it

doesn't matter--now----"

A question must have shown in my eyes even as I decided not to put it,

for all at once she laughed a little.

"Oh, I'd tell you if you wished to know, but you'd be no wiser. It's a

name you've never heard. But one thing I should like----" For one moment

she hesitated.

"I ask you nothing."

"No; but I should like you to know one thing--oh, quite for my own sake!

If ever you _should_ hear a name--three names--four--you needn't believe

them. I lied perfectly recklessly. It seemed to me--stupidly

perhaps--that I owed him that. So I blackened myself. You see, they

tried to find out--my friends----"

"You mean----?"

"Oh, one lover was enough," she answered, with another laugh, rich, low,

and without bitterness. "And it doesn't matter--_now_."

It was then that I knew what she meant by that reiterated "now." The

thing that beat suddenly in on me explained in a flash that curious

attitude of protection towards myself. That kiss blown from the top of

the morning bus--the shillings she earned by sitting to morose and

impatient artists--those heavenly Sundays--that desertion which also she

ranked as a happiness--her self-slanders rather than betray her

betrayer--all these things together had not, somehow, seemed to me to

make up that "best part of Life" of which she spoke. Beyond even her

beautiful devotion to her boy must lie some other deep sustaining dream.

Without such a dream, her life would not have been what patently it

was--full....

But now it was all in the eyes she turned on me....

And I knew that the look that told me she loved _me_, had long loved me,

and must now go on loving me to the end, put love between us high out of

our reach for ever.

"You can't prevent it," she almost triumphed, shining it all out on me.

"It's mine, whether you want me to have it or not. And of course it

makes no difference to you----"

"None," I murmured mechanically....

"Then _haven't_ I all the best of Life?" she exulted, smiling up at me.

And before that strange tension that for so long had held us had quite

left us, I had muttered, with a little choke, "God bless your little

chap, anyway!"

It was all I could say. The other thing she had told me could make no

difference to me.

Then came the swift change. It came as we reached the top of Grosvenor

Place, turned, and descended again. It came as a torrent of rapid

speech, sometimes both of us speaking at once, both stopping and

waiting, and then both breaking out simultaneously as before. They were

short, half sentences, taken and given back with bewildering quickness.

"And now you want to know----" she said.

"Yes----?"

"--how I knew?"

"How did you?"

"I didn't--quite--I knew in myself--not otherwise."

"In yourself--how?"

"Oh, how does one know these things? One sees this--hears that----"

I clutched at her hand.

"Not so quickly. What 'this'? What 'that'?"

"Well, for one thing, Kitty Windus----"

"Does she know?"

"No----"

"You hesitate."

"She doesn't know. She helped me to knowledge. She doesn't know she

did."

Again I snatched at her hand.

"That's not the same thing. She may know of--that other--but not know

she's let you know."

"That's just possible. That's why I----"

"Oh, anything's possible!" I broke out. "Let's be plain. Does she know

that I killed----?"

"I don't think so. Indeed I'll say no."

"But you hesitate again. (Come this way--it's quieter.)"

As if a fusillade had been suspended there came a thrilling silence. We

were passing St. Peter's Church at the east end of Eaton Square. We were

in the Square before she replied.

"Very well. Don't interrupt unless I ask you questions. I'll be as plain

as I can. It's extraordinarily difficult...."

I waited.

"You see," she began carefully, "Kitty's so--queer. You couldn't expect

that insane arrangement with her to go on indefinitely--I mean that

incredible engagement of yours. She was bound to find out something.

She----"

"Yes--that's it--what _did_ she find out?" broke once more from me.

"Sssh!... Of course she found out--about Evie--that it was Evie you were

in love with. Naturally she did. What woman wouldn't? _I_ saw it, with

far less reason than Kitty had. We won't waste time over that. So after

she left you, she expected week by week to hear of the next thing--your

becoming engaged to Evie. Week by week, I say. How many weeks was it?"

"Four years."

"Week by week, for four years. All those weeks. If it didn't come one

week it would be the next--you see. She prophesied it. It became an

_idee fixe_. You never saw her during that time?"

"I never as much as----"

"Nor heard of her?"

"No."

"You didn't hear of her breakdown?"

"No; but all this doesn't----"

"Doesn't go beyond you and Evie. I know. Don't interrupt. And Evie

didn't hear of her breakdown either?"

"No--I think I can say that."

"What did Evie think of--let us say Archie Merridew's suicide?"

I hesitated. "What should she think? She thought what everybody

thought--more or less."

"As something inexplicable?"

"I assume so--but of course I've never----"

"What does she think now?"

"I hope she doesn't think of it at all. As far as I've been able----"

"Yes, yes, yes.... Plainly, then, have you told her? Told her what you

did?"

"Told her? No!"

"Have you _thought_ of telling her?"

"Have I thought ... do you mean have I thought of killing her too?"

Louie was suddenly silent. A hansom slipped swiftly through the deserted

Square, its wheels making no sound and the slap of the horse's hoofs

dying gradually away in the distance. The rain had stopped, but the

trees still dripped sadly, and something vague and far away had

approached, resolved itself into a policeman's shining cape, and passed

again before Louie spoke.

"Well," she said slowly, "after all, that's not the immediate point.

That comes later. The first thing's Kitty's condition. That condition,

as far as I can make it out, is this. You showed yourself clever and

unscrupulous almost beyond belief in one thing, and she found you out in

that; now, I fancy, she thinks there's no end to your cleverness and

unscrupulousness. Positively no end. You're _capable de tout_.... So she

broods. Of course she ought never to have been allowed to live alone....

And she knows she has these--fancies--about you--and so when she's all

right she's quite persuaded they _are_ fancies. And most of the time she

_is_ all right. Then the fits come, and--she's off."

A quick shiver took me. "Do you mean----?" I faltered.

"Violently? Oh no. At the best she's just as she used to be; at the

worst she's merely helpless, a child. Otherwise I should never dare to

have her come and live with me."

"What, you're----?"

"Well, somebody's got to look after her."

"And so you----?"

"She's coming to me next week."

"I see," I said slowly....

Again such a silence fell on us as, after prolonged sound, has an

importunate quality that even sound has not. As if in a dream, I strove

to realise that Evie and Billy Izzard were away over in the Vale of

Health, dozing probably, awaiting my return from the Berkeley. I tried

to understand the plain fact that I was walking the wet streets in the

company of a woman who, judged by ordinary standards, bore a smirched

reputation, and that I had permitted that woman to make, though without

words, a declaration of her love for me. As this last grew on me a

little, I let my mind take that particular bypath of speculation. I

almost forgot her presence by my side in my odds and ends of memories of

her. Once, at a breaking-up party at the old Business College, she had

said to me: "As you don't come to me, I come to you," and at the same

party she had asked me for a cup of coffee, which I had brought to her

in the crowded room instead of giving it to her in some sequestered

corner where we could "sit out." Then other memories came. Memory adding

itself to memory until I had all the leading facts of her story--that

fatal, insignificant, desperate accident--then, mockingly too late, her

love for myself--her so strangely happy life, its fulness now to be

turned into a superabundance by her voluntary taking up the care of a

weak-minded woman--all, all her happy-unhappy story. And now for us to

be thrown together like this! Extraordinary, extraordinary! I fancy we

were somewhere in the neighbourhood of Sloane Square by this

time--Sloane Square, with Evie and Billy waiting for me in the Vale of

Health, and her boy asleep many hours ago!... I smiled, though grimly

enough, as my eyes encountered my own trousers. Those expensive garments

were soaked to the knees. Louie, broken by her day's arduous sitting,

now hung heavily on my arm. Her sleeves lay flat to her arms, and her

skirt held pounds' weight of water. And we were still walking down Lower

Sloane Street, and approaching the Barracks....

It was in Lower Sloane Street--there is a little naturalist's shop

thereabouts--that I stopped, once more facing her. It seemed to me that

there was something which, if she didn't know it, she ought to know.

"Louie," I said slowly, putting a hand on her shoulder to turn her face

towards mine, "I don't know whether you know what you ought to do?"

I saw that she did know. For the first time I saw a return of her old

ironical smile. But "What's that?" she asked.

"What, unless you do to me, I can now equally do to you."

"And what's that?" she smiled.

"There are no accessories in this business. You're a principal too."

She laughed outright. "All right, Jim," she said. "I'll trust you not to

give me away."

"But listen to me----"

That was exactly what she would not do. She cut in brusquely.

"Oh, my good man, be quiet! Anybody'd think you thought I was going to

blackmail you!" Then, leaning heavily on me once more, "I suppose all

you men take that view of it," she went on, with an energy that

triumphed momentarily over her fatigue, "but here's _my_ view if you

must have it--that men deserve rewards who stamp out creatures like

that! Oh, you needn't look at me--_I'm_ experienced if anybody is, and

_I_ know why young men hang themselves just before their weddings! And

that, Jim--come along, it's no good standing here--that's why I asked

you whether you'd told Evie. You know your own business best, but I'll

tell you this--that if women were on juries not a jury in the land would

convict you! _Oh!_----" She shuddered the more strongly that she earned

her daily bread in the way she did. "_I_ can face these things. I've

learned--I've had to. Am I the same woman you once knew? I think not.

And I tell you plainly, that if you'd done what you have done for me I'd

kiss your feet and ask you to bless me! But of course there's Evie. I

don't know why you haven't told her: I don't know her very well, you

see. My own opinion is that you'll find you've got to tell her. I'm sure

that sooner or later you'll find that. And that reminds me of something

else. What do you suppose you ought to do about Kitty?"

I smothered a groan. "Oh, I'm past supposing," I answered dully.

"Poor man!... Well, this is how it is. Kitty's unreliable. She has these

outbreaks. I hope she'll be better with me, but I can't answer for that.

So--I'm only preparing you, Jim, but it _may_ come to this, that before

she gets it fixed in her head once for all that young Merridew _didn't_

hang himself she's got to be made quite certain that he _did_. Even if

she's got to be told so she must be made certain of that. And I shall be

greatly surprised if you haven't to tell Evie exactly the opposite.

_Voila!_"

I scarcely heard her now. An overwhelming weariness had come over me.

It was a weariness of the mind no less than of the body. My mind too

seemed to be making an endless pilgrimage through wet and benighted

streets, far from its rest; and even that strange hallucination of

Louie's protection had left me now. After leaving Lower Sloane Street I

suppose we must have turned still farther west, for I seem to remember

that we passed the Chelsea Hospital, but in this I may be wrong, unless

they have since pulled down a row of old houses I distinctly remember

seeing across the road. It must have been not very far from there that I

went for a time, physically and mentally, all to pieces. Probably the

net result of all this talk had just begun to sink into me--that, the

intervening years notwithstanding--my well-nigh flawless planning

notwithstanding[1]--my cares and prayers and vigils notwithstanding--all

was not yet over. I have boasted in my time that I have been untroubled

by what I had done, and that is also no lie; but the consequences are

another matter. Suppose even that Louie were right, and that I had done

nothing but a worthy act; there are still worthy acts that overwhelm the

doer of them. So the prophets were hounded to their death--and I was no

prophet, but, for a space of time of which I took no account, a broken

man, who, in a doorway somewhere near Swan Walk (it was an old doorway,

with a porter's grille and an antique bell-rod), gave out utterly,

began to double at the knees, and would have fallen but for the two arms

of a woman as spent as himself--a woman who murmured, with unthinkable

selflessness and a charity and encouragement and comfort past telling:

"Oh, come, come--come, come!"...

By-and-by--it could not have lasted very long, for a clock somewhere was

striking one, and the public-houses had been closing as we had left

Sloane Square--I was better. I was well enough to walk, still supported

by her, to a bench on the Embankment, where we sat down. Her umbrella

was still in my hands; how I had come to break it I didn't know; but I

had broken it, and I remember thinking dully, as if it had been a great

matter, that I ought to get her another ... or get that one mended....

It was only right that I should pay for it. Somebody would have to pay

for it, and in common fairness it ought not to be she.... And, I

thought, while I was about it, I might as well get her a cab also. She

must be unspeakably tired, and I had four shillings in my pocket....

"Thanks," I said. She had taken off my ruined silk hat and unfastened my

white bow and collar, and was bending over me solicitously, fanning my

face ineffectually, now with my own hat, now with her hand. "Thanks.

That was absurd of me. I'm not--not in the habit of giving out like

this--but we'll finish--another time, if you don't mind. Where do you

live?"

She lived near Clapham Junction. "But what about you?" she said, as we

rose.

"Oh, I'll take a cab too. I'll walk a little way though. Up here--this

seems a likely place for cabs----"

We took one of the minor streets that led to the King's Road. There I

hailed a hansom that was returning eastwards. I had put her into it when

a thought struck me.

"By the way," I said, "what is your name--your business name, I mean?"

She smiled, as if at a wasted care. "Oh, the same," she said.

"Does Billy Izzard know you know me?"

"No. That is, he didn't."

"Well, he does by this time probably. If Evie and he have been

talking----"

("'Urry up, gov'nor!" growled the cabman.)

"He'll think it odd I didn't speak to you. Never mind. Where can I hear

from you?"

"Your office----?"

"Yes--no, I mean, not there." I had suddenly remembered Miss Levey.

"Give me your address."

She gave it to me, and I gave it to the cabman. "You really will take a

cab?" she said, looking anxiously at me as the vehicle pivoted round.

"Yes, yes."

And she was off.

I was in the King's Road, without a penny. It was a quarter to two when

I passed the Post Office near Sloane Square, and it was twenty past by

the time I reached Park Lane. After Park Lane I lost count of the time.

I came out of the doze in which I walked to find myself at various times

in Upper Baker Street, near Lords, and, I don't know how long after

that, on the point of missing the turning into Fitzjohns Avenue. The day

began to break greyly. I still walked, sleeping as I went. It was only

as I ascended Heath Street, hardly a quarter of a mile from home, that I

came sufficiently out of my torpor to begin to wonder what account I

should give of my absence to Evie.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See "In Accordance with the Evidence."

IV

Three weeks or a month after that night on which I had reopened, so to

speak, a bottle containing a grim and familiar genie, an incident

happened that riled me exceedingly. This was nothing less than an

unexpected meeting, on one of our Sunday visits to Hampton Court, with

Miss Levey.

Under other circumstances this meeting would have been too ludicrous for

annoyance. It happened in the Maze, of all places, where, in some moment

of physiological high spirits, I had taken Evie, threatening to lose her

and leave her there. As a matter of fact, I had lost both her and

myself. Perhaps you know the Maze. Its baffling windings of eight-foot

hedges have their single legitimate way out, which you may find if you

can; but, for the release of burrowers at turning-out time, there is

also a locked iron gate, as impossible to miss as the true exit is to

find. Half-a-dozen times, believing ourselves to be at last in the

proper alley of green, we had been brought up by this gate; and it was

at the gate that we met Miss Levey.

At certain points, where the high mattress-like hedges are a little

thin, you can almost see through them; and several times we had caught

sight of a scarlet shadow, accompanied by a young man in checks. Now,

at the gate, we came full tilt upon this scarlet. Her wide hat and

buttons only were black, and from her bosom projected an enormous frill,

very white against the red cloth, that gave her the appearance of a

pouter pigeon. She had lost Lord Ernest or the President of the Board of

Trade or whoever her companion was, and of course there was no avoiding

her.

"_You_ here!" she cried, seizing both Evie's hands and setting her head

so far back and on one side that it was half lost behind the frill.

"Vell!" (I write it so, though her accent was in reality less marked.)

"This _is_ delightful!--You see, Mr Jeffries----!"

I was mortified, but couldn't very well show it. I laughed. "Oh! What do

I see?"

"Dear Evie and I do meet after all!" she half jested.

"Oh!" I laughed again. "Well, if that's all, you could have met long

ago. I assumed that you didn't come up to see us because you didn't want

to."

It was, of course, lame in the extreme, but Miss Levey saw fit to affect

to believe it. Again she put her head back like an inquisitive bird,

dandling Evie's hands up and down.

"Oh, _I_ thought I wasn't wanted! So of course I stayed away.... Vell,

Evie, I _am_ glad!"

So Evie said she was glad, and I said that I was glad too, with

something about the ridiculousness of such old acquaintances standing on

ceremony, and Miss Levey, I knew, was the only glad one of the three.

"Isn't it annoying, the way we always find ourselves at this gate!" she

said, when at last she had dropped Evie's hands. "Aschael and I have

been here at least ten times! You ought to know the way out, Mr

Jeffries, a clever man like you!"

"I'm afraid I don't, but there's the man up the perch there--he'll

always point out the way."

"Oh, but one doesn't like to be beaten!" she said, with a covert look at

me. "Dear me, I'm quite hot! I think Aschael must have given me the

slip. Perhaps you wouldn't mind finding him for me, Mr Jeffries?"

My polite "With pleasure" didn't in the least represent my feelings, but

as I thought I should recognise the pawnbroker's assistant who had

brought our Arab horse-tamers, I bade them stay where they were, and

left them.

After I had found the ringleted Aschael it took us half-an-hour to

escape from the pair of them, and even then it was done only at the cost

of the invitation I had so obstinately withheld. Miss Levey was to come

up with me from the F.B.C. on the following Wednesday evening, and

Aschael was to fetch her away again at ten o'clock. It seemed quite a

nicely balanced point whether she would kiss Evie or not when she left,

but she did not, and for some minutes after we had lost sight of them I

saw the man up the perch pointing out turnings and heard his calling to

them.

"Deuce take her!" I muttered, twenty minutes later, when Evie and I had

also been shown the way out. We had passed the glowing parterre, and

were just turning into the cool Fountain Court.

"It couldn't be helped, dear," said Evie. "It was all there was to do.

We needn't get into the habit of asking her if you don't want her."

"Oh, it doesn't matter," I answered absently. I was once more wondering

whether Pepper intended to take Miss Levey over presently from the

F.B.C. Already I was pretty well resolved that he should not.

And I was quite resolved on this point when Evie next spoke. We had

stopped by one of the arches, and were looking over the grass plot and

fountain in the middle. The Court was deliciously cool, and I should

have liked Billy Izzard to make a sketch of Evie as she leaned against

the pillar, dressed in soft pink muslin, her hand touching her cheek,

and only her dark eyes darker than that Black Knight sweet-pea of her

hair. Those eyes were full of grave thought.

"Jeff," she said diffidently by-and-by.

"What, dear?"

"You know where you left us just now----"

"Left you and Miss Levey?"

"Yes.... She told me something I think I ought to tell you."

"Oh? She didn't lose much time," I could not forbear remarking.

"It was something I know you'd far rather I told you--it was something

about poor Kitty," Evie went awkwardly on.

"Oh?"...

You may guess from this "Oh?" that I had told Evie no more than I had

thought fit about my meeting with Louie. Indeed, of that extraordinary

walk that had begun at Swan & Edgar's corner and ended in the King's

Road, Chelsea, I had told her nothing at all. When I had reached home

again, at four o'clock in the morning, Evie had been in bed, Billy

asleep by the ashes of the dining-room fire. He had yawned hugely and

stiffly: "A-a-a-h!... I like your idea of a couple of hours in the

evening, my friend! I say, you look rather done up; what have you been

doing with yourself?... Evie? She went to bed at two; she would sit up

till then. What time is it? Nice goings-on at the Berkeley!"

And Billy and I had lighted the fire and breakfasted, moving about

quietly so as not to wake Evie. Evie did not know the exact hour of my

return, and had made no remark about the condition of my hat and

trousers.

It seems an odd thing to say, but I simply had not dared to tell her.

When I say that she would never, never have understood I am not

belittling her either; she simply would not have understood. It would

have been different had I been able to tell her all, but better nothing

than half. Nay, what she already knew was in its way almost too much,

for of course Billy, taking studio mysteries for granted, had told her,

rather as a joke against myself, of my coming upon Louie Causton. Seeing

Evie's almost painful blush, he had been a little sorry he had spoken.

For while Evie liked Billy, she could never get used to the idea of his

models. It was a little as if some outwardly very charming person should

be in reality a known dynamiter. And even when she had grasped the model

(so to speak) in theory, it had only to be made a personal matter for

the blood to rise into her cheeks. Suppose I had come upon Aunt Angela

thus!... So, unable to tell her all, of the later events I had told her

nothing.

But now she said again, looking over the quiet Fountain Court, "It's

about poor Kitty. Louie didn't tell you, I suppose?" (I had admitted

having had a few words with Louie.)

"In Billy's studio, do you mean?"

"Yes."

"No," I answered, with what strictness of veracity you will observe.

I saw, by the way she dropped her great eyes and pushed a bit of gravel

about with her toe, what had come over her again. Just as, on that Bank

Holiday evening in the tea-garden in the Vale of Health, she had had

Kitty, if not on her conscience, at any rate on her magnanimity, so she

had her now. By reason of that slight emptiness and waiting state of her

life (in spite of all that I could do), her thoughts still flew back.

Between my departures in the mornings and returns again o' nights,

reminiscences, the freer in their play that her work was merely

mechanical, still occupied her. These reminiscences welled up again in

her now, and, added to them, filling her breast completely, was that

half-compunctious desire of the victress for the squaring of accounts

that is to be found in the exercise of compassion.

And as I saw her perturbation, something welled up in me too. She did

not know I was looking at her, but I was, and already I had begun to see

the only thing that would be more than temporarily efficacious against

these strayings. There was only one thing. A picture came into my mind

of a woman who blew a kiss from the top of a bus, played on the floor on

Sundays with her boy, and found her life full and happy....

"Oh, my darling," I thought as I looked at her, "is it so very, very

long--so very long and empty?... Very well.... It will modify a good

many plans, but better that.... Your life too shall be full--and your

arms----"

When next she looked up there was, about her eyes, a tiny bright edging

of tears that did not fall.

"Jeff," she said, unusually quickly, "Kitty's ill. She has attacks of

some kind. I couldn't quite make it out. I suppose Miriam Levey'll tell

us all about it on Wednesday. I know you don't like Miriam, but she's

awfully troubled about Kitty, and thinks she ought to be looked after.

Somebody told her--told Miriam--that poor Kitty'd been found one night

walking round and round Lincolns Inn Fields, and when the policeman

asked her, she couldn't remember at first where she lived. Oh, Jeff, it

does seem so sad!"

Privately I found that horrible. It had been in Lincolns Inn Fields that

Kitty and I had walked together, and to think of her still haunting the

place, alone, I found very horrible. But if that horror was mine, it was

not going to be Evie's if I could help it. I nodded gravely, and took

her arm.

"Well," I said (although I was again cudgelling my brains to see how

Miss Levey's visit could be frustrated), "no doubt you will hear all

about it next Wednesday. I wouldn't worry till then.... What about tea?"

We left the Palace, and sought the teashop near the Bridge. Miss Levey

and Aschael passed the door of the shop as we sat, and Miss Levey waved

her hand and gave us an artificially bright smile. But her goose was

cooked with Jeffries & Pepper. I had far too much respect for her

inquisitiveness and persistence to admit her to our new enterprise.

Between her and myself Pepper would not hesitate for long, and I

intended, if necessary, to put the matter in precisely that form....

After tea, Evie and I took another turn in the Palace. It was a golden

evening, with a wonderful bloom on the old walls, windows flashing

yellow, and the forests of twisted chimney-stacks brightly gilded. Her

arm was in mine, and her hand made little delicious pressures from time

to time, and ever and again her cheek seemed to be on the point of

falling against my shoulder. Louie Causton's touch had not thrilled me

thus. Some high forbiddance would ever have said Louie Causton and

myself Nay, but here was flesh of my flesh, and the promise of sweet and

rosy flesh between us--for we had spoken of it, and the west that bathed

all in golden light was not more tranquil than that other heaven in our

hearts....

I remember very well our journey back from Waterloo in the old horse-bus

that night. I remember it because of that whispered new pact between

Evie and myself. She, tired out no less by that gentle vista than by the

fatigues of the day, slept for the greater part of the way with her head

on my shoulder and her hat in my lap; and I had to wake her to change

buses. In the new bus she settled down again; and I was left free to

consider whether the promise I had passed would or would not

necessitate a hastening of matters with Pepper. If it should turn out

so, so much the worse. In any case it had to be done. For fear of the

seven devils, Evie's mind was no longer going to be left as it now was,

swept and garnished.

As it happened, I was spared the trouble, though not the subsequent

responsibility, of putting Miss Levey off for the following Wednesday

evening. On the morning of that very day, as I took Judy a number of

drafts, he said, in Miss Levey's hearing, "Are you doing anything

to-night?"

"To-night? I'm afraid I am," I replied, though solely for Miss Levey's

benefit. "To-morrow I'm not."

"To-morrow won't do. You're a dashed difficult man to get, Jeffries!"

"You should have given me a little notice," I said, though foreseeing

already that Pepper would eat Miss Levey's supper that night.

"Well, we'll talk about it presently; if you can possibly put your

engagement off, do.... Now, Miss Levey----"

He began to give instructions to Miss Levey.

Later in the morning Miss Levey sought me.

"Oh, Mr Jeffries," she began, very _empressee_, "I think we won't come

to-night. Mr Pepper----"

"It is rather awkward," I admitted. "I'm awfully sorry----"

"Please don't apologise. It really doesn't matter. I can come up any

evening, you know."

"Well, in that case----"

"We'll fix another evening. I know you and Mr Pepper have private

affairs."

"Yes," I thought, not very graciously, "and to be in at 'em's the only

thing you want more than to pry into my domestic ones." But aloud I

said, "It's awfully good of you--do tell Mr Aschael how sorry I am."

So it was Judy Pepper, and not Miriam Levey and Aschael, who dined at

Verandah Cottage that night.

Were it for no other reason than to let you know a little of these

Schmerveloff neighbours of mine I should have to tell you of Judy's

visit that evening. This sounds a little portentous, as if my tale were

about to take a sensational turn, with bombs and secret agents in it. Be

calm, it is not; I only mention these Schmerveloffs as standing, in a

way, for certain forces of which Pepper and I intended to make use. A

very few words will explain what I mean.

We are not social theorists, Pepper and I; we have to handle social

problems practically, as they come; and so in the wider humanitarian

sense we may be all wrong. But even then this Schmerveloff school of

thought had its importance for us. It was very useful to us, for

instance, when the Aliens' Act was drafting; and with the outbreak of

Syndicalism, with all the bearings that has had on Trades Disputes, it

became very important indeed. Perhaps, after all, the only hint I need

give you as to the way in which we handled it is this: that, the rate of

progress of this International Socialism being necessarily that of the

slowest-moving and most backward partner in the alliance--Russia--we

have used that fact either as a drag on Syndicalism or as an apparent

encouragement of it, as the needs of the moment dictated. And when I say

"apparent encouragement," I mean that we have winked at all this

translation from the Russian pessimists that has harnessed art to

purposes of social propaganda. That, since racial development is of far

greater lasting weight than economic theory, has seemed to us the

readiest way of letting folk see that Russia's problems are not

necessarily ours; and if we can only keep Syndicalism in check, they may

Russianise our literature completely for all Pepper and I care.

So we talked of Russia that night. Evie, as soon as she had seen Pepper

instead of Miss Levey, had worked herself into a flurry in changing

preparations at the last moment, and had had to run out for candles for

our guest's candlesticks. But when dinner was at last served,

half-an-hour late, nowhere could have been found a prettier waitress

than we had--Evie herself. Indeed, she seemed to prefer waiting to

dining. As long as she was doing things she felt herself on safe

ground; it was the folding hands afterwards to talk to our terribly

engaging visitor that she dreaded. She strove to attain by little

formalisms what he achieved by the mere ease of nature, and, as she

stuck tenaciously to it, I admired what was neither more nor less than a

kind of courage in her. We finished dinner, and ascended to the

drawing-room, I carrying those cumbersome candlesticks.

Pepper worked really hard that night to put Evie at her ease, but alas!

through no fault of anybody's, but by the sheer decreeing of the stars,

his labours were not a success. The first accident he had was when he

asked her how she found her neighbours, compelling her to say that she

didn't find them at all--didn't know them. And when he said, "Ah,

Russians are like that," and related an anecdote, she perturbed me a

little by asking him whether he had been in Russia--for I did not know

that the extraordinary man had, and fancied the question not very kindly

put. But Pepper surprised me by saying "Oh yes," and went on to tell

more stories....

With these stories he was safe for a time, but presently he again had

bad luck. He was speaking, as if he had come for no other purpose than

to tell us travellers' tales, of the difficulty of the Russian language,

which I gathered to be great; and suddenly he said, "But it's an

exceedingly valuable asset from a commercial point of view. Should you

have a boy to put into business, Mrs Jeffries, let him learn Russian."

It was, of course, hyper-sensitive of Evie, but not unnatural in the

circumstances. She coloured deeply; she rose; she said good-night; and

even then Pepper was not at the end of his troubles, for, advancing

punctiliously to open the bedroom door for her, that insecure old door,

that always opened at a touch, flew back, displaying the unmade bed on

which Evie had lain that afternoon, and the general disorder of the

interior. Pepper was already in the midst of a deep bow, but he must

have seen.... After that I got him whisky; we settled down to our talk,

and, ordinary speech being plainly audible from the bedroom, he dropped

his voice to match my own tones--and was, I dare say, heartily glad when

the evening was over.

This mention of our cramped quarters reminds me that I may as well get

those inconveniences of which I told you over at once. To save time, I

will tell you both what they were then, and what they afterwards became.

I had begun well-nigh to hate children. The schools, you see, had not

yet reopened, and urchins played under our windows till half-past nine

or ten o'clock at night. I frequently had work in the evenings that

demanded close concentration, and it mostly happened that, when I sat

down to it, as if by appointment the noise began. I do not know which

howl or thump or bump was the most hideous. Iron hoops, driven with a

hooked iron rod, were bad, but the shouts and whoops and calls, all in a

blood-curdling Cockney accent, were worse; for while by great resolution

you can nerve yourself to endure an iron hoop, you never know which yell

or shout a child is going to emit next. These had all the horror of

unexpectedness. I used to make mental bets on it, and I was always

wrong.... And then sometimes there would come an endless racket that

resembled nothing so much as a fire-engine in full career, which, on

descending, I should discover to come from a diminutive cart at the end

of a string, pulled by a toddler of four.

Sometimes these noises drove me half frantic. I carried my papers from

the dining-room to the drawing-room--thence to the bedroom--I even tried

the kitchen; and this, mark you, was important work, work that has

since, I may say without boasting, become of national value. I spoke to

policemen--I even used the power of beauty, and got Evie to speak to

policemen--but only to be told that they were as helpless as I:

"Children is eddicated now, and not as afraid of bobbies as they used to

be." And on a fatal evening I was so unthinking as to distribute a

number of pennies in order to buy an hour's peace for a calculation that

seriously involved the interests of three shipping lines. That settled

it. Thenceforward I was never without children. One Sunday afternoon I

forgot myself and boxed the ears of the biggest of them. That brought

round a parent--not a father, but a mother.... Ugh!----

And the house itself was far too small. Billy Izzard's sketches on our

walls shook to my tread, and passing vans made the very foundations

tremble. In order to get even our small belongings into the place Evie

had to put boxes inside boxes, and boxes inside these again, so that in

the finding of a garment she had not worn for some time the whole tiny

bedroom floor was choked with boxes. Save for the little recess in the

kitchen, the triangular cupboard under the stairs was the only storage

accommodation we had. With the greatest care, Evie could not always

avoid hanging an old skirt over my best hopsack (West's, Bond Street),

or mislaying some article of which I had need in the very moment of

bolting for my bus. And worst of all was that screen on the verandah

that gave us nothing to look at but a short slope of parched green.

Verandah Cottage! By Jove, yes!...

One other thing I will mention, though this did not come till the

winter. The neighbouring house, which hitherto had been a tomb, became

alive. I never knew the reason for this sudden awakening, nor whether

Schmerveloff had suddenly found himself reduced to taking in lodgers, or

whether he was merely holding out a helping hand to co-revolutionaries

in the hour of their need; but I do know that presently he began to

have a succession of extraordinary visitors. Hairy, uncouth-looking men,

with soft hats, came for a week or a month, and brought their women,

fat, spare, astrakhan-capped or bare-headed. They wore smocks and

embroidered _portieres_, and worked at peasant industries. One of them

had a child, the sweetest of little girls--but oh, her sweetness

vanished from me when she began to play at all hours in the garden,

shouting, crowing, and impossible to turn away! I went so far as to wait

on Schmerveloff himself about this dreadful child, and was told that,

inconvenient as these things might be to me, the question was not a

private one at all. It was a Social Question. Society oppressed them,

they oppressed me; it was Society that was wrong.... I told our fellows

this afterwards, when the Aliens' Act was drafting; Robson was immensely

amused. "What did you say?" he asked.... Of course there was nothing to

say....

And then, about Christmas, the Social Question became acute indeed. For

the development of the peasant industries the most Asiatic barber-robber

of the lot set up a furnace, a lathe and an anvil....

No wooden walls (save Nelson's) could have kept that racket out....

Had the sum of the world's beautiful things been added to, I could have

grinned and borne it, but it was beaten copper-work the Asiatic made.

And I could do nothing.

I pass on.

Weeks before this invasion of beards and embroidered casement-cloth, I

earnestly hoped that my firstborn, when I should have one, would never

remember that little house with the glass-panelled door and the

verandah. But the prospect of our "domestic event," as Miss Levey called

it, hardly weighed on me yet. I gave little heed to Louie Causton's

prophecy, that I might sooner or later find myself driven to take the

desperate course of telling Evie what, so far, only Louie and myself

knew; and I did not see, as Louie seemed to see, where the peril lay. If

it was only a question of keeping Evie busy and amused for a little

while longer, I thought I should be able to manage that. Only later did

I see myself as a man who pours water constantly into a vessel and tells

himself that because the level remains the same there is no leak. I

still intended to stand between Evie and Life. In effect, if necessary,

I would live much of her life for her. And now let me, before I leave

this part of my tale, tell you briefly what that life was at its

loveliest.

V

Had there ever been any shadow of a division between Evie and myself,

which there had not, it must have vanished now. I did not attempt to

conceal from myself that her gifts did not extend in all directions

equally. Socially expert in Pepper's sense, for example, she could

hardly yet be expected to be, and I should have been unreasonable to

have reproached her for not grasping the intricate problems that, if the

truth must be told, frequently filled Pepper and myself with perplexity.

But these things are independent of deep humanity, and by as much as she

fell short in them she was richly dowered in other ways. It was still

the love of a woman I wanted, not the semblance of a masculine

friendship; and I had it, and was glad at the thought of my rich

possession. Often, for pure emotion, I caught her in my arms when I saw

her, rejoicing yet timorous before that which was presently to come to

pass; and whether it was a pallor that sometimes crossed her face, or a

sudden glow as of some warm and Venetian underpainting or else a

smiling, happy lassitude infinitely moving in its appeal, all spoke of

the pledge that had been given and taken between us.

Quite past telling was the peace this pledge brought to me. I was, after

all, to begin anew. Despite Life's mauling of my hapless self, here was

a tiny white leaf preparing for the writing of a record that should

supersede and obliterate my own. Deeper things than men know were seeing

to that ushering, and by nothing less miraculous than a birth was I

going to be delivered from the body of that haggard death. Often, as I

seemed to be busily writing at our small folding table, I quite lost

myself in the contemplation of this coming manumission; and day by day,

looking out over Waterloo Place and the Mall, I conjured up her

image--resting while Aunt Angela (who now came up from Woburn Place

almost daily) dusted or swept or washed up, taking her easy walks on the

Heath, sewing (though not now for herself), or doing such light work as

would not tire her. Fortunately, the Social Question next door had

reached the crisis of over-production in the beaten-copper market; a

glut had supervened; and the making of the wooden bowls and carved

porridge-sticks that are designed for oppressed serfs and sold at a high

price to the amateurs of the Difficult Life, caused less disturbance to

our panels and pictures. The whooping child too had gone.

Aunt Angela had bought Evie a deep wicker basket lined with pale blue,

and with the greatest circumspection I delayed to fill this basket too

quickly. We talked for a week before making a purchase, and, in one

case, for quite three weeks. This was when I bought, at a shop near

Great Turnstile, what Evie called a "jangle"--a beautiful Jacobean coral

mounted in silver, with many silver bells and a faint piping whistle at

one end. Both as I entered the shop and left it again a grey nightmare

tried to fasten itself upon me, of a woman who had forgotten where she

lived, walking the Fields round the corner, alone at night; but I shook

the horror off.... Even down to such details did I keep Evie from

fancies--for she had fancies, the ousting of which was a matter for

diversion rather than argument. One of these fancies was that she now

wanted to see Miriam Levey. Another was that she did not want, just then

at any rate, to see Louie Causton.

For as it chanced, Louie came the nearest (though with a nearness sad

enough) to a married woman of anybody she happened at present to know;

this, of course, largely as a result of my own exclusive attitude. Aunt

Angela, by virtue of George and her other experiences, knew as much as

ten married women, and that was frequently precisely the difficulty.

Certain charwomen, I gathered, inured to immoderate families, gave Evie

the benefit of their advice now and then, but that was about all. And it

was one evening as I cast about for an opening to introduce Louie's name

that Evie herself said once more that she would like to see Miss Levey.

"Certainly," I said, with a readiness that was only the result of

seeing no way out of it this time. "As long as she won't tire you."

"I won't let her do that," Evie promised.

"All right," I said.... "And by the way"--I put this as if it had just

occurred to me--"should you care to have Louie Causton up if Billy knows

where to find her?"

"Yes, I should some time--but not just now, dear. You'll tell Miriam,

then?"

"Yes."

I had promised it before I remembered something that might have made me

less ready to promise it. It was now the beginning of October. We had to

take our holidays in rotation at the F.B.C.; for a fortnight I had been

working late in order that Whitlock might take his; and next on the list

in our department was Miss Levey. Grumbling that it was almost too late

to take a holiday at all, she was going away for a week-end only.

Instantly, I saw what that meant....

The next day I capitulated to her as gracefully as I could.

"You'll be able to have a really satisfactory visit now, a whole day," I

said. "It would only have been a couple of hours before."

"I'll take _such_ good care of her!" she purred.

"I am sure you will," I said conciliatingly....

Three days later Miss Levey was up at Verandah Cottage. She was up there

the next day also. Although she had always gone by the time I returned

at night, she was up several times after that.

Well, it couldn't be helped ... and I was going to tell you, not about

Miriam Levey, but about my happiness and Evie's.

Today, in my house in Iddesleigh Gate, there are many things thrust into

dark corners that will ever occupy odd corners of my heart. They are the

pieces of furniture from that poky old place in the Vale of Health. The

people of my household tell me they are shabby, but as I never see them

divorced from a hundred gentle associations, their shabbiness matters

nothing to me. In the children's day-nursery there is the old

shop-damaged couch from the Tottenham Court Road cellar. Its pegamoid is

frayed and its springs broken, but Evie lay on it before those

destructive little hands came into being. She lay on it with her legs

wrapped in an old, faded, mignonette-coloured Paisley shawl--for

presently the days were shortening, we had started fires, and Verandah

Cottage was a Cave of the Winds for draughts; and my housekeeper had a

bad five minutes only the other day when that shawl nearly went out of

the house with the bottles and crates and old rags. The bookshelves Evie

used to dust and polish still serve me; and quite a number of smaller

things, including that first wicker basket into which the "jangle" was

put (Evie keeps that) carry my mind back in a twinkling to that early

time.

Evie had her little jokes about our unborn mite. Still further to repair

the slight on Hampton Court of our Greenwich honeymoon, the infant at

one time was to be called "Hampton," but as she had ten different names

for it each week, a name more or less didn't matter. Its eyes were to be

so-and-so--the colour also varied day by day. If a boy, it was to be of

my own bone and stature; if a girl, less. I used to joke with her when,

seeing her brooding and gently smiling, I pretended to discover these

and a hundred other patterns and specifications in her eyes; but,

however lovely these imaginings were, they were no lovelier than

herself. Though the days now seemed less long, the little _elans_ with

which she ran to me when she heard my step at night were a passionate

rendering of herself far greater than before; and I will end this part

of my tale with the first time, the very first, I heard her sing.

She had gone into the bedroom that night, and I had heard her moving

about; and then there had stolen out low contralto notes that might have

belonged to somebody else, so new were they to me.... She was happy. She

was so happy that she was learning to sing. I stood listening, with

tears gathering in my eyes and suddenly rolling down my cheeks....

She was happy....

She did not know why, a few moments later, with the face of one who

hears joyful news, I pushed at the bedroom door and took her, half

ready for bed as she was, into my arms.

Oh, to hear her, of her own accord, sing--and to know that soon her song

would not more gently rock those feeble limbs and close those unknowing

eyes than it now brought rest to my own weary frame and sleep to my own

heavy eyes, weary with watching for the day that at last, at last was

coming!