PART I

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IN ACCORDANCE

WITH THE EVIDENCE

OLIVER ONIONS

IN ACCORDANCE

WITH THE EVIDENCE

BY

OLIVER ONIONS

Author of "The Exception," etc.

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

NEW YORK

_Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton_

Copyright, 1913

BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

TO

WILLIAM ARTHUR

LEWIS BETTANY

CONTENTS

PART I PAGE

HOLBORN 11

PART II

WOBURN PLACE 113

PART III

THE GARRET 191

PART I

HOLBORN

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE

I

It seems strangely like old times to me to be making these jottings in

Pitman's shorthand. I was surprised to find I remembered as much of it

as I do, for I dropped it suddenly when Archie Merridew died, and

Archie's clear, high-pitched voice was the last that ever dictated to me

for speed, while I myself have not dictated since Archie took down his

last message from my reading. That will be--say a dozen years or more

ago next August. It may be a little more, or a little less. Nor, since I

do not keep it as an anniversary, does the day of the month matter.

Either in my rooms or his, we had a good deal of this sort of practise

together about that time, young Archie and I--reading aloud, taking down

and transcribing. I am wrong in speaking of my "rooms" though; I had

only one, a third-floor bedroom near the very noisiest corner of King's

Cross. It was just opposite one of these running electric advertisements

that changed from green to red and from red to green three times every

minute; you know them; there are plenty of them now, but they were new

then. The street was narrow; this horrible thing was at a rounded corner

not more than five and twenty yards away; and even when my lamp was

lighted it still tinged my ceiling and the upper part of the wall above

my bed, red and green, red and green--for I had only a little muslin

half-curtain and no blind, and if I wanted to read in bed I had either

to turn my lamp out until I had undressed or else to undress in a corner

by the window side of the room, because of being overlooked from across

the way. I don't think there were any other lodgers in the house. It was

a "pub," the "Coburg," but I could get on to the staircase without going

through the bars on the ground floor, and always did so. The rather sour

smell of these lower parts of my abode reached me up my three flights of

stairs, but I had got used to that. It was the noise that was the worst

(except, of course, that red and green fiend of an advertisement)--the

noise that greeted me when I woke of a morning, awaited me when I came

back from Rixon Tebb & Masters' at night, and often became maddening

when, at half-past twelve, they clashed to the iron gates of the

public-house and turned the topers out into the street, to fraternise or

quarrel for half-an-hour or more beneath my window.

But we worked more in Archie Merridew's rooms than in mine. "Rooms" is

correct here. He had the whole top floor of a house near the Foundling

Hospital, a pretty house with a fan-lighted ivy-green door, early

Georgian, a brightly twinkling brass knocker and bellpulls, and a

white-washed area inside the railings to make the basement lighter. His

folks lived at Guildford; his father paid his rent for him, thirty-eight

pounds a year; and his pleasant quarters under the roof had everything

that mine hadn't--he could sit outside on the coped leads when the

weather was hot, draw up cosily to a fireplace shaped something like a

Queen Anne teapot when it was cold, and the ceiling, truncated along one

side, didn't begin to turn red and green the moment the twilight came.

It gives me a shiver to think how atrociously poor I was in those days.

More and more of that too comes back with the half-forgotten shorthand.

I don't mean that I've ever forgotten that I used to be poor; it's the

depth and degradation I mean and that--this will seem odd to you

presently, as it seems suddenly odd to me as I write it--that memory is

still more horrible to me than anything else I have ever known. My

having got rich since doesn't wipe it out. If I were to become as rich

as Rockefeller I should never forget the rages of envy, black and deep

and bitter, that used sometimes to take me when I thought of Archie

Merridew's circumstances and my own.

I have got riches as I have got everything else--_everything_--I ever

wanted, by attention to detail. You'll probably agree with me by-and-by

that by "attention to detail" I mean rather more than most men do when

they give this advice to young men about to start in life. I remember

they used to give us, as it were, the empty form and shell of this maxim

at the Business College, the place in Holborn Archie and I attended; but

you've got to have been down into the pit and come back again before you

realise the terrible force there is in these truisms. And no less in

doing things than undoing them afterwards (when that has been necessary)

have I planned to the very last _minutiae_. If I have never seemed a

particularly busy man, that has been because I have always disliked

being seen in the act of doing a thing. And where I have passed my trail

is obliterated.

Archie Merridew and I were only half contemporaries. He was younger than

I by a good seven years--was, as a matter of fact, only twenty-three

when he died. And in nearly everything else we were as sharply

contrasted as we were in our fortunes. Indeed, we were much more so, for

while I miserably coveted that thirty-eight pound upper floor of his

near the Foundling Hospital, my faith in myself and my ambition would

have helped me over that. Physically, we were as different as we could

be. My almost gigantic size made me, in my cramped red and green lighted

apartment, an enormously overgrown squirrel in the smallest of cages;

but to Archie's rather dandified little dapperness his series of roof

chambers was spacious as a palace. Mentally we diverged even more. I was

taciturn, he lively as one of the crickets that used to chirp behind his

little Queen Anne teapot of a fireplace. And as for luck--well, if luck

ever so much as nodded to me in those days, it seemed to change its mind

and to pass by on the other side, while he seemed to pull things off the

more easily the more recklessly he blundered.

And he had his people at Guildford, while I had never a soul in the

world.

I don't know how we contrived to hit it off as well as, on the whole, we

did. Perhaps that too was part of his lucky disposition--he could get

along even with me. He always spread some sort of a weak charm about

him, and this charm always disarmed me even, when to all intents and

purposes he was merely rubbing in my horrible poverty. He would tell me,

as if I wasn't already eating my heart out about it, that it was about

time I made an effort--that _he_ wasn't going to remain in those stuffy

diggings of his all _his_ days--and that if he had only half my brains

he'd be up somewhere pretty high in a very short time (as he probably

would had he lived)--all this, you understand, for my good, the

cigarette gummed to his prettily shaped upper lip wagging as he talked,

and with the best intentions in the world. He was quite devoted to me;

would tell me how he had told other people about those extraordinary

brains of mine; and he never dreamed (though it was not long before I

began to) that our respective ages were even then making of our

companionship a hopeless thing. A lad of seventeen may attach himself

for a time to a man whose years number twenty-four of bitterness and

exclusion, but they will part company again before the one is

twenty-three and the other thirty.

I was only an evening student at the Business College, while Archie

spent his days there. Often enough he did not turn up in the evening at

all; indeed, he only began to do so with unfailing regularity some time

after Evie Soames had put her name down for the social evening course of

lectures on Business Method. Evie Soames was a day student too, though

only on three days in the week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and

the lectures on Method were given in the evening because they were

specially addressed to those who, like myself, were employed during the

day, and deemed to be ripe for the more advanced instruction. I don't

think Archie was very much wiser for Weston's (our lecturer) efforts,

but he was genuinely grateful to me for my explanations of them

afterwards, and would pat me on the shoulder affectionately, and tell me

he couldn't understand why everybody else didn't see what a rare good

sort I was. That was his backhanded idea of a compliment.

I think, in those early days of mine, I hated pretty well everything and

everybody; and I cannot better show you how little I found to love than

by giving you, before I go on with my tale, an account of my day at that

period of my life--any day taken at random will do.

I had to be at Rixon Tebb & Masters' by nine, why, I don't know, since

nobody else of any account whatever turned up much before half-past ten.

But eight of us had to be there by nine o'clock, and I will tell you how

our eight had been got together.

You know--or don't you know?--that there are firms that contract for the

supply of "office labour" of all grades, from the messenger boy to the

beginning of the confidential clerks; holusbolus, in the lump, as much

of it or as little as you please. You pay, if you are an employer, a

certain number of hundreds a year, and the agency does the rest. One

down, t'other up; sack one man, and telephone for another. The agency's

supply, at the maximum of a pound a week, is practically unlimited, and

the firm escapes all personal responsibility in regard to its staff.

I was one of these consignments of labour--or rather an eighth of one. I

don't know now what I did. I know that I addressed envelopes and checked

columns of figures and lists of names, quite devoid of meaning to me,

and got eighteen shillings a week for it. There was no chance that I

should ever get more than eighteen shillings. Ask for nineteen and the

telephone rang, the agency was informed of your request, and ... well,

three times I had seen that happen.

One chance of escape, indeed, we had; the firm was clever enough to

allow us that. It was by way of what I may call the permanent junior

clerkship. The permanent junior clerk was, as it were, breveted with the

rank of the real clerks in the inner office; and so was hope dangled

over the heads of eight of us. There was the junior clerkship amongst

the eight of us. That or nothing.

I need hardly say that jealousy, espionage, and scheming besmirched our

souls.

Well (to continue my account of my day), I addressed envelopes or read

aloud from interminable lists until one o'clock, and then I lunched.

This we were not allowed to do in the office, so that usually I ate from

a paper bag in one of the quieter streets, or else had a scone and milk

at an A.B.C. shop round the corner in Cheapside. I was alone. My

fellow-stuff from the agency, always on the lookout for a pretext of

mistrust, found one in my (I admit) uncommon face. I put in the time

until two, when I was not smothering up annoyance at those who would

turn round to stare at a man who had been made half a head taller than

the rest of the world, in wondering whether those about me were as rich

or worse off than I, and whether they were able to procure a bath as

cheaply and easily; and then I returned to Rixon Tebb & Masters' again.

At six-thirty I proceeded home, washed, and went out to dinner. I dined

at one of the establishments near the corner of Pentonville Road; you

have seen them, there is an arrangement of gas-jets behind a steamy

window, and, in galvanised iron trays, sausages and onions and saveloys

fry. The proprietor of the "pull-up" fetched my dinner out of the window

on the prongs of a toasting fork, and I ate it in a small matchboard

compartment, or, when these _cabinets particuliers_ happened to be all

pre-occupied, at an oilcloth-covered table that ran down the middle of

the shop. During and after my meal I read the whole of _The Echo_--I was

allowed as a habitue to retain my seat longer than the casual diner. But

on the nights on which I took a bath (did I say I sponged on Archie

Merridew for this convenience, carrying my clean shirt in a paper that

also served for the wrapping-up of the one I had removed?), I added to

my obligation by supping with him also, and then we walked on to the

Business College together. My clothes I bought in Lamb's Conduit Street,

my boots in Red Lion Passage. I had always the greatest difficulty in

getting a fit in either. At one time I had the misfortune to make myself

very unpopular among the proprietors of a row of barrows not far from

Southampton Row. This was over the purchase of a collar, and the cub

under the naphtha lamp had made some joke or other about the uncommon

size I required, saying that the horse collars were to be had in St

Martin's Lane. The blow under the ear I gave him was heavier than I

intended; I am afraid I broke his jaw, and I avoided the street for a

long time.

After the class, I either continued my studies, as I have said, with

young Merridew, or else took a walk. In this again I was always alone. I

went far afield. If I went west, I usually turned along Great Russell

and Guildford Streets, but the moths, English and foreign, of the half

light of this last thoroughfare caused me at one time to take the way of

Holborn and Gray's Inn Road. The nickname they gave me, they also gave,

I don't doubt, to fifty men besides myself, but it seemed somehow to

attach itself more conspicuously to me because of my general

conspicuousness. It was that of the mysterious and ubiquitous author of

a series of unelucidated crimes as to the nature of which I need not be

specific.

Then, when I had walked my fill, I returned to my cage opposite the red

and green electric advertisement.

This is a fair sample of my days at that time.

II

There is a showy boot shop now where the Business College used to be;

the new place is in Kingsway. There, in Kingsway, I am told they have

methods and appliances undreamed of in my time--mechanical calculators,

wonderful filing systems, elaborate duplicators, and lectures on

Commercial and Political Economy and Mercantile Law--but the old Holborn

curriculum included shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, and lectures

on method and not very much besides. When I left, I remember, they were

just beginning, as a high novelty, advertisement-writing. Later, I

myself took this class, though only for a few weeks.

Even then, I think, the Holborn place was condemned to come down. A

second-hand book shop occupied the ground floor; and above the book shop

window three columns, each of three bow windows, one for each floor,

formed the frontage. The three bow windows of the top floor were ours.

Inside, the place was small and inconvenient in the extreme. It had been

a dwelling-house once, and the old fixtures still remained--dark

cauliflower wallpapers, heavy ornamental gas-brackets, and little

porcelain fittings by the fireplaces that still rang, in the second of

the two rooms that had been knocked into one to form a lecture-room, a

row of bells that resembled a series of interrogation marks.

Only four women attended the classes. The business woman was,

comparatively speaking, a rarity then, nor can I quite make up my mind

as to how much things have changed in this respect and how much they

remain exactly as they were. They have certainly changed if it is all on

account of her certificate that a young woman can now walk into an

office and be promptly asked at what hour it will be convenient for her

to begin her duties on the morrow; and, lacking certificates, three of

our four students could hardly have fallen back on any natural diploma

of personal charms. I mean, in a word, that Miss Windus, Miss Causton

and Miss Levey were, to say the least, not remarkably pretty, though

Miss Causton was beautiful as far as her figure and movements went.

But Evie Soames was very different. She was, in actual years, twenty;

but she seemed still to stand among the debris of her teens as an

opening tree stands over its sprinkling of delicate fallen sheaths in

the spring. Both graces and awkwardnesses of an earlier time still

clung, as it were, to her stem. She had, as I later learned, been at one

school until she was seventeen, at a second school until she was

nineteen, and now, after a year of indetermination and arrested

development at home, was still further delaying her maturity by

beginning again not very differently from the way in which she had begun

at fourteen. She had, of course, picked up a number of unimportant

acquirements by the way, but had never, in those days when I first knew

her, given it a thought that Evie Soames was a person Evie Soames might

well have some natural curiosity about. She moved, neither woman nor

schoolgirl, among the charts and files and dusty ledgers of the Business

College, slender, dark, necked like a birch, and with eyes than which,

when she looked suddenly round, the flash of a negro's teeth was not

whiter.

I have told you how my days were passed, but not yet said anything about

my dreams. As I cannot speak of Evie Soames apart from these I will do

so as briefly as I can.

Whatever else in my life I may have been, I have not, even in my dreams,

been a sensualist. It might in some respects have been better for me if

I had. But so far was I from that that I have even been charged (though

the charge is really as wide of the mark as it could well be) with a

certain inhumanity; by which I mean, not cruelty, but--how shall I

express it?--a certain inaccessibility to the ordinary human relation.

And I do not believe the woman lives who, given her choice of these two

interpretations of the word, would not prefer the former. Only in the

latter does she foresee her final defeat.

Therefore, when at midday in Cheapside, or in Guildford Street as I

returned from my lonely rambles, or in Holborn or Oxford Street at the

hour when shops and offices turned out their human contents, male and

female, after the day's work, I watched the pattering feet on the

pavements, I was not stirred as the fleshly stockbrocker or

conscienceless "blood" is stirred. (You must allow me this

generalisation; you know what I mean.) My eyes did not meet other eyes

as seeking acquaintance. I never, in train or tram or 'bus, set off my

vacation of my seat for a woman against the bow or thanks I might

receive. I never, even at my loneliest, held a waitress or attendant in

talk for any satisfaction I had in her nearness. Whatever I have learned

from crowds, crowds have had nothing of mine. Nor, my heavy and immobile

appearance notwithstanding, was I (I affirm this) a solitary because I

was refused acquaintanceship. I was a solitary because I refused it.

But what I refused in the streets by day, I could not sleep for seeking

when I lay down at night. What I sought I did not and do not know; I was

only conscious of a hunger within myself that, not being satisfiable by

the eye-profferings and other partial prettinesses of the crowd, were

never offered that sustenance. I have heard this hunger described as a

Divine Discontent, but that is to beg a question of some magnitude. It

might be a very different thing from that. It might just conceivably be

an Infernal Discontent. Or it might, in the case of a man who regarded

neither God nor devil--But I wander. This, I say, was my dream, and I

shared it with no sensualist.

Of course you have already guessed why I say all this ... guessed what

happened. Between the commonnesses under the street lamps which I

spurned, and those dreams that were ever unseizably beyond my most

ardent reaching forth, I fell in love with Evie Soames.

* * * * *

There are, I know, men in whom a grim and uncompromising aspect is so

richly compensated for by other gifts that, like John Wilkes, they may

fairly brag that with fifteen minutes' start they would out-distance in

a woman's favours the most regular-featured buck in London. Therefore

(if I may use a "therefore" without egregiousness) it troubled me little

that Miss Windus, not to speak of her two companions, Miss Causton and

Miss Levey, found me unattractive. In that coin I could have repaid her,

had I wished, with interest. Since I did not wish, my attitude was one

of fully-armed reserve. All three of these women seemed to me to be for

ever proclaiming, if not in words, yet in everything but words, that

men, _as_ men, have worldly opportunities given them by a sort of

favouritism, and as a kind of present for their circumspection in

getting themselves born men--as if in this world either men or women

ever got anything they were not quick enough or strong enough or callous

enough to seize for themselves. Miss Windus in especial, a

sharp-featured woman of twenty-eight, with apertures like little scalene

triangles out of which her eyes peered with an expression quizzical and

weak and yet perky and self-confident at the same time (as if she was

saying perpetually to herself, "We may as well hear what _this_ one has

to say for himself!") struck me as being the final word in

self-importance and inefficiency.

The top-heavy little Jewess, Miss Levey, was a very broker for gossip

and tattle, and the remarks she occasionally made about others to me

were quite enough to warn me that she would make equally free with

myself to others. Both she and Miss Windus seemed to shout aloud the

very sex-difference the existence of which they seemed at the same time

to be denying. They "could not think of giving trouble" when one or

other of the forty men placed a chair or adjusted a light or carried a

Remington for them; but they would have known how to show their sense

of the absence of such attentions all the same.

I do not know that Miss Causton pleased me very much more, but she at

any rate moved with a wonderful physical harmonious grace and flow. If

one might judge from her hands and wrists (a business certificate on

which she ever bestowed the most sedulous care) she did not come from

quite the same social level as the other two--was, perhaps, the daughter

of a doctor who had married his house-keeper, or of a decent governess

whose decency had not prevented her from running off with a groom; but I

made no attempt to unravel either this riddle or any other that her

rather contemptuous grey eyes might contain. The attitudes she took in

reaching down a book from a shelf or passing her arm about the waist of

one of the other girls when they assembled for gossip were all I wanted

of her, and those began and remained a purely aesthetic satisfaction.

Therefore there could hardly have been a more complete contrast than

there was between these apparently a-sexual yet in reality excessively

sex-conscious women and my delicate unawakened Evie Soames. She made no

more difficulty about giving me a "Good-evening," or "Good-night" than

she did with the rest of the world; and though for a long time our

speech stopped at that, it was yet as much as I had with any other

woman whomsoever. That I should get even thus much of what everybody

else in the world seemed to get as a matter of course came so gently and

softly over me that I did not dream of a worse misery that might lurk

hidden within it, and in those early days of my love a mother would not

have fought more wildly for her babe than I would have turned on any who

had offered to come between me and even this sparse sweetness that had

come for the first time into my life.

III

The events I am now about to relate occurred during those early days,

while I was still content to possess my dreams, as if as long as I

closed my eyes the world would stand still about me.

One November night, as the series of lectures on Method was drawing to a

close, I returned with Archie Merridew to his rooms, silent, but

exceedingly happy. The cause of my happiness will not greatly excite

you, it had been no more than Evie's "Good-night, Mr Jeffries," given me

as I had waited on the stairs of the college for young Merridew, who had

lingered behind to ask Weston something or other.

I had heard them coming down from the landing above, and, looking up,

had seen the trail of Miss Causton's long grey coat and Miss Windus's

blue and green plaid skirt and her gloved hand on the shaky old rail. I

ought to say that the western-most of the three pillars of bow windows I

have mentioned as forming the Holborn frontage of the college was the

one that lighted the various floors of the staircase, and if parties had

ever been given in that old house before it had got quite so old, it is

odds that the embrasure in which I had just then been standing, that of

the first floor, had held a few palms in pots and a couple of figures on

its low window-seat many a time. But that night it had only held myself,

waiting in the shadow shaped like a coffin-shoulder that the globeless

gas of the landing cast.

I had heard Miss Windus's little smothered exclamation. "_Oh!..._ That

man!" but instantly she had gone on talking in a higher voice. Certainly

she had had reasonable colour for the pretence that she had not seen

me--had I not happened to hear her exclamation.

And if I had heard it, so, of course, had Evie.

"Good-night, Mr Jeffries," Evie had said as she had passed me, and Miss

Windus also, as if suddenly discovering me, had given me quite a bright

"Good-night!" Miss Causton also had given me a languid, almost insolent

smile.

I was happy. I should probably have taken myself and my happiness off

somewhere had it not been that that evening I had made use of Archie's

bath, and had left in his place, besides that paper parcel I have

mentioned, a notebook of which I had need. So I had returned with

Archie, and, not intending to stay, had yet sat down, overcoated as I

was, before his fire.

"Better take your coat off for a bit," Archie said. "I'd like a squint

at your notes too, if you're not in a hurry."

The notes were part of our preparation for the examination in Method

which was to be held shortly before Christmas. I threw apart, but still

did not remove my coat, and Archie took up my notebook and read as he

stood. Presently, feeling for a chair with his foot, he sat down, still

reading the notes.

He looked up from time to time, but the questions he put barely

interrupted my reverie. I stared at the fire in the pretty old-fashioned

grate. He had no gas up there; his cardboard lamp-shade, green outside

and a little heat-browned inside, stood on a chenille-clothed table; and

he had given the shade a tilt for his convenience in reading. Thus the

fireplace end of the room lay in a sort of irregular parabola of

illumination. There were bright circles on the ceiling above the chimney

of the lamp; then came spaces of cosy gloom; and below, in the pleasant

light, were his arm-chairs, his small book-shelf, and, the rail of it

catching the firelight, his high perforated brass fender. In the middle

of a great cam of light that lay over the dimity-papered wall between

his sitting and bed rooms, his dressing-gown, hanging from a hook in the

bedroom door, made a grotesquely human-shaped shadow.

By-and-by, with the book on his knee and his eyes still fixed on it,

Archie began mechanically to unlace his boots. I looked up as he

reached for his slippers, and then resumed my reverie.

I was glad that Kitty Windus, whether she realised it or not, had been

made the subject of an innocently awkward little snub. I couldn't stand

the woman. I couldn't stand it that, ignoring my existence when she

could, she spoke to me, when she did speak, with a false vivacity that

only enhanced the effect of her passing over at other times. And lest

you should think I was wasting my detestation on a rather insignificant

object, I must ask you again to remember what my days were. The whole

Scheme of Things seemed to be against me; but there is not much relief

to be had from taking a blind fling at the Scheme of Things. A man with

a grudge against the world will be very likely indeed to take that

grudge out of the nearest person. I was not prosperous enough to have

much time to waste on human charities. So, in my resentful hours, I took

it mercilessly out of one against whom, in my calmer moments, I had no

grudge except that she was not a thousand miles away. And if she had

been a thousand miles away, I should have vented my bitterness on

somebody else. I had to get rid of it somehow.

But if my thoughts gave Miss Windus more of this than she fairly

deserved, perhaps Evie Soames got more in another sort than she deserved

either. There was not one of the few stray graces and sweetnesses I had

ever known that did not accrete to and abide about the thought of her.

No generous emotion, no human impulse I had ever experienced, but came

with adoration and rich gifts with which to exalt her. In my heart I

lighted tapers about her image. I did not ask myself whether she had

supplanted my dreams, existed side by side with them, or was indeed my

dreaming made truth. I did not wonder what she might have been in

another man's dreaming, nor whether, apart from the dreaming of some

man, she existed spiritually at all. I only knew that the fire inside

Archie Merridew's fender was not warmer than that central warmth that

seemed to steal (as if there also some bud-sheath had yielded) about my

heart as I pictured again her sapling-straight figure, the flash of her

turning eyes on the landing, and the tone in which she had bidden me

good-night three quarters of an hour before. I leaned back as it were in

some longed-for luxurious resting-place of the heart. I do not know the

origin of the tears that gathered in my eyes.

Suddenly Archie threw the book on to the table and stretched himself. He

gave a yawn and put his feet on the fender.

"Oh, I'm sick of work for to-day!" he said. "When are you going to start

smoking?" he added as he drew out a cigarette-case.

I answered something or other--it didn't matter what, since my lovely

moment had gone with the breaking in of his voice.

"Oh, well!..." he laughed, lighting up. Then, glancing at the blowing

end before throwing his match into the fender, he said: "I say--what a

jolly sort of girl that Miss Soames seems to be!"

As the cold of a spring night freezes the newly mounting sap of a tree,

so I felt some sweet and vigorous change suddenly arrested in my heart.

"Wh-who?" I said. I had to make two attempts at it.

He laughed.

"Oh, of course--I forgot, girls don't interest you. Like your not

smoking, I suppose. Hadn't noticed there were any girls at the

college--only see text-books and Remingtons.... Well, not to spring it on

you too suddenly, there _are_ four girls there, three of 'em rather

sticks, but the fourth a ripper. What a rum chap you are!" he concluded

with another laugh.

He had drawn his chair still closer to the fire, and now sat with his

feet, not on the fender, but half-way up one of the pilasters that

supported the chimneypiece. As he kicked off one slipper and began to

warm one small foot on the iron-work just inside the pilaster, his

profile was turned to me; but I didn't at first risk stealing a look at

it for fear of meeting his eyes. Stealthily, however, and moving my head

as little as possible, I did so. It was a pretty profile--fair curly

hair thick on the crown, his head rather high at the back and of a long

shape to the chin, good nose, pleasantly curved mouth--the head of a

decent enough but quite unremarkable youngster of twenty-two. He was

neatly dressed in a grey stripe, and wore a black-bound red waistcoat

with brass buttons. I say he was decent enough, and so he was: I knew he

knew the taste of whiskey, but don't think he drank it very often. "Good

wholesome beer," he used to say with an air of experience, "was more his

mark"; but even then I think the experience was more that of his

companions than his own. You wouldn't have said there was much harm in

him, and he would probably have to spend his allowance unwisely once or

twice before he learned to spend it wisely.

I made the moving of my chair an excuse for getting him better under

observation.

"Oh yes, awfully jolly," he repeated, blowing a plume of smoke through

which the firelight shone rustily. "Fun ... no end of fun ...

rather!..."

Then he smiled, and the smile came and went and came again as he smoked.

I don't know why, up to that moment, I had never thought of it--never

thought of how it might already be or might presently become. I suppose

the reason was that a man cannot hold the commerce I held with dreams

without to some extent losing his touch of actuality. But now, at last,

I was awake enough.... As if the room had turned colder I pulled my coat

a little more closely about me.

It was not then that that heart of mine, which I have likened to a bud

suddenly arrested in the moment of its unfolding, became more likenable

to a grenade with its fuse waiting exposed for the spark that should

bring destruction....

But I was quite calm. For the matter of that, I am never anything else

when it comes to the point. My angers have served their purpose when

they have brought me to the point. I _use_ anger.... Therefore, though I

knew already that three careless words of his had opened an immeasurable

abyss between us, I was able to speak to him without a tremor, from my

chair at one side of his hearth to him in his own at the other.

"You mean Miss----What's her name?"

"Soames," he informed me. "You know--that young girl--you must have seen

her.... Yes, full of fun.... I laughed.... I did laugh!"

From the way in which he still laughed there must have been a specific

occasion for his mirth. I knew of none such. I wished to know, however,

and I also wished to know what he meant by "fun." Young men mean so many

things by "fun," and it--But I stifled something within my breast almost

before it was born there. When I spoke, my voice was as steady as it has

ever been in my life; but the devil, watching a soul that hesitates on

the point of sin, does not watch more closely than I watched that fair

boy with the cigarette dangling from his upper lip.

"Ah, yes, I've seen her.... _Pretty, too_," I hinted.

But he put, if he heard, her prettiness aside. He chuckled again.

"I went last Sunday to the Zoo, you know," he said. "They were spending

the week-end in town--my folks. And I saw her there. Or rather, I didn't

see her at first, it was Mumsie who saw her. 'I think there's somebody

you know,' she says to me, and I looked, and there she was, bowing to

me. Then up came pater--he'd dropped behind somewhere--and blest if he

didn't know her aunt--she lives with her aunt--they have rooms in Woburn

Place. So we all went round together.... I started the fun by saying how

like old Weston the secretary bird was; so we went round looking for

likenesses--raked up everybody we knew----" He stopped, suddenly.

He wouldn't, had he been a year or two older, have pulled himself up

quite so sharply. It is true he didn't go so far as to colour, stammer,

or bite his lip; but his meaning, or his inadvertence, or whatever you

like to call it, could hardly have been plainer had he done all these

things. An anecdote was related to me not so very long ago by an agent I

employ to advise me in my picture-buying. It was of the most sardonic of

our caricaturists, and this merciless artist had (so the story ran)

refused to caricature a certain person, giving as his reason that, while

a vain or over-praised or too consciously handsome face was fair game

for his ironic pencil, a face already heavily visited by nature went

free. But for Archie Merridew's sudden embarrassed check I might have

imagined that _my_ own visage might have gone free also. It is, after

all, not repellent. I bear quite a strong resemblance to at least one

public man whose photographs appear in the illustrated papers--a

distinguished scientist. My stature is the most striking thing about me,

and if your humour takes that turn you can find remote suggestions of

any number of people at the Zoo.

I made, however, no sign, and he, judging his clumsiness to have passed

unnoticed, went on:

"Funny the pater knowing her aunt like that, wasn't it? Rather fun

though. Mumsie said she must come down to Guildford for a few days and

stay with us; if she does I shall go home that week-end--you bet!"

My answer gave me no pain. It came, I think, out of just such an

automatic reflex as causes an "opening" in conversation to call forth

its own obvious reply. It would have been more marked not to say it than

to say it, and as I am telling you, in my state of still tension it

didn't hurt.

"Oh!" I said. "And when does one congratulate you?"

"What d'you mean?" he asked.

"Why, on your engagement."

Instantly I knew I had said the right thing. There was nothing either

false or forced about the little exclamation he made, half scoff, half

laugh. His face was clear as crystal. By "fun" he meant, simply, mere

physiological laughter, the bubbling-up of the high spirits of his

years. Human resemblances at the Zoo are quite enough to call up this

purely functional giggling. She was "fun" (the odds were a thousand to

one) as his sister might have been fun; with a certain freshness and

sense of discovery perhaps, but otherwise not very differently. In spite

of the sequel, I still think I am right in making this statement.

"Don't be an idiot!" he said.... "I say, Jeff, I couldn't quite make out

that about indexing and cross-references to-night. Did he mean that the

cross-references are a sort of double entry for when the subjects

overlap, or what?"

But there was still something I wished to verify.

"Who?" I asked. "The--secretary bird?"

This time I think he did colour faintly, but as he had swung his legs

down from the fireplace and was reaching for my notebook again I could

not be quite sure.

"Pass me the book," I said.

For the next quarter of an hour I gave him as collected and lucid an

explanation of his difficulties as if I had had no other care in the

world. Then I lifted myself up. I buttoned my coat, put the notebook

into my pocket, and briefly recapitulated what I had told him.

"Thanks, awfully," he said gratefully, when I had finished. "You are a

brick. _You_ ought to give the lectures instead of old Weston. I'm sure

if I pass this exam it will be all you. Must you go?"

"Must."

"Well--so long--I think I'll make a few notes myself before I forget

again."

And, still master of myself, I left him arranging papers and feeling in

his inkstand for a pen.

IV

I do not know but what I might still have retained control of myself

when I got out into the street again; I do not know, because I didn't

try. Instead, no sooner had I got away from him than I went temporarily

all to pieces. I remember I passed up Charlotte Street and turned into

Mecklenburgh Square; and there I leaned against the railings of the

garden that occupies the middle of the Square. I stood with my shoulder

against them, looking stupidly down at my feet. There was a thin and

melancholy mist; the lights of the boarding-houses and nursing-homes of

the east side of the Square struggled through it with difficulty, and

presently I found that my foot was playing absently with a few sodden

plane-tree leaves that had drifted against the kerb.

Slowly, as I stood there, my stupidity gave place to a dull anger. I

don't think it was anger against anybody in particular; it was as

objectless as it was useless and exhausting. But if you have had that

gall in your mouth that makes all the world taste bitter, you will

understand my miserable rage. This changed presently to a shivering,

weeping rage The wide portalled door of a house opposite opened, and a

servant-girl came down the shallow steps to post a letter; I daresay she

supposed I was unwell or a drunkard; and a passer-by might have

concluded that I had an assignation with her, or had just had a quarrel.

Then, when I had had a little ease of my anger, I pulled myself together

and banished it again. Now that I had come, tardily enough, out of my

fool's paradise of the past weeks, I had other things than purposeless

anger to think of. I moved away from the railings; the maid, returning

from the posting of her letter, quickened her steps to avoid me; and I

walked slowly northeastward through the Square.

Quickly I became calmer still. Soon I was calm enough to recognise that

I needed this. "What," I said ironically to myself, thunder-struck at a

thing so very surprising! "Did you think that because your head was in

the clouds ... come, come, you'd better look at the thing; you mayn't

have any too much time, you know; if I were you I'd take a walk and

think it out."

I turned into Grays Inn Road, and began to take my own advice.

While I had no reason to suppose that she had fallen in love with him, I

knew almost for a certainty that he had not with her. He was not at

that stage yet. Already he was nibbling at other pleasures, and with a

youngster of his kind one or two nibbles mean three or four. They may

even mean ten or twelve. So far so good. I was still in time. I was, in

fact, so far beforehand that, of the three of us, I was probably the

only one who knew, not what had happened (which was nothing) but what

might happen--which was everything. That I took for the starting-point

of my consideration.

And I saw that that, at the outset, was an enormous advantage to me. Not

only could I watch events, but I could watch them to infinitely better

purpose that I knew what to look for. They, when it came--the "it" I had

in my mind--(I ought rather to say did I suffer it to come) would not,

in the bewildering wonder of it, know what had overtaken them; while I,

by a timely use of care and skill, might even turn to advantage those

disadvantages of mine which, huge as a church, might have been deemed to

outweigh everything else. No more perfect cover for hidden motion could

have been devised than I already possessed. Who suspects, of anything,

one whom to suspect would on the face of it be absurd? I could, did I

find this necessary, use practically the whole of my conspicuous life

and narrow circumstances as a screen.

I reached the top of Gray's Inn Road, crossed to St Pancras Station,

and, following the line of coal merchants' offices on the left side of

the road, plunged into the shadows of the Somers Town arches. It was

there that I thought of another thing that I must interrupt my

meditation to acquaint you with.

You may have wondered why, if all young Merridew said about my brains

was true, I had still, after some years as an agency clerk at Rixon Tebb

& Masters', not been able to get away from the place. Well, the answer

to that is involved in a hundred other things that have ended, after

fifteen years, in my now being able to write this chapter of my personal

history at a great square mahogany and leather writing-table, with two

softly-shaded electric standards upon it, and, containing it, a lofty

panelled study, rich and quiet, with a carpet soft as thymy turf and my

pictures and carvings and cabinets mirrored in floor-borders, brown and

deep as the pools of my Irish trout stream. You do not want the whole of

that long story. I will tell you as much as is necessary here. The rest

I may tell at some other time.

The truth was that I _had_ left Rixon Tebb & Masters'--had left the

place, and had achieved the seeming miracle of being permitted to

return. Such a marvel was without precedent, and I cannot say that it

had been accomplished altogether by my own contrivance. I said a little

while ago that there were eight of us, had over in a lump from the

agency; I also said that only by way of the junior clerkship was any

advancement possible from that slavery of addressing envelopes that

might have been for company circularisation or might have been sent over

in shiploads to the Flushing and Middleburg book-makers for all we knew;

and I had had the signal luck--I forgot this when I said that luck had

always passed me by on the other side--to present myself for

reappointment, without any hope whatever of getting it, at the very

moment when Polwhele had succeeded to this post.

How Polwhele had chanced to be occupied as he had been occupied when I

had presented myself I understand only too well. Sneaking, prying,

slandering, peaching--you didn't become Rixon Tebb & Masters' junior

clerk without having been through the mill of all this and more. Poor

worm, he had got so used to it that he couldn't help it. Having attained

to the junior clerkship, he was going to work up through the seniors by

the same means, I suppose, and the means he had been making use of, at

the moment of my coming upon him, had been the furtive rummaging of a

waste-paper basket that had come--I knew this by the pattern of it--from

Mr Masters' private office.

It had been, of course, the perfect opportunity for me, who was subdued

to sneaking and peaching also. I had leaned my elbow on the brass rail

of a tall desk and stood looking down on him--such a long way down it

seemed--he was on his knees.

"Hallo, Polwhele!" I had suddenly said. "Going to put Samson Evitt out

of business?" And then I waited to see how he took it.

I don't suppose you've ever heard of Samson Evitt. He has been a

solicitor; at that time he described himself as a waste-paper dealer;

and what he really did, and for all I know does still, was to buy up,

through a hundred miserable agents, and on the chance of coming upon

some private letter or secret draft, the contents of such receptacles as

Polwhele's fingers had been deep in at that moment.

"Going to start in Samson's line, are you, Polwhele?"

The colour of his face had changed as swiftly as that of the electric

advertisement opposite my bedroom at King's Cross. He had gone as white

as chalk. I had known perfectly well that he wasn't going to sell

anything to Samson Evitt, but was merely playing his own hand with the

firm; but he'd had no business at all with Mr Masters' waste-paper

basket, and knew it. It had been rather horrible, but I had known I was

as good as reinstated already.

"I'm coming back, Polwhele," I had said.

He had not spoken--only looked at me with eyes full of terror.

"You're going to see that I come back, Polwhele," I had informed him.

"My God, Jeffries, you wouldn't have the heart."

"Oh no--not as long as I come back."

Then swiftly he had seen his years of shifts and meannesses all wasted

unless....

"Oh my God! How can I do it?" he had groaned.

"I don't know, Polwhele."

I did not know, nor do I know now how he did it. Men do impossible

things when they've got to. That had been on a Friday evening, at a

quarter to seven (the zeal of a new junior clerk always kept him after

the others had gone). I had given him Monday in which to see to it. On

the Tuesday morning, at nine o'clock, I had been back at my envelope

addressing again. These things have to be done sometimes. And I need

hardly add that now Polwhele would have turned up at my funeral with a

smile on his lips and a nosegay in his buttonhole.

Of the period between my leaving Rixon Tebb & Masters' and my return

thither I will not speak. You may guess at the nature of its experiences

from the fact that I was thankful to get back to my lists and addresses

again.

It would have surprised my fellow-clerks, who saw in me one as listless

as themselves, to learn with what unresting energy I had worked since

then. I had resolved that my next leap from that frying-pan should not

be into the fire, and the means by which I was making sure of this was

the Business College in Holborn. I knew my great natural gifts and the

power that smouldered within me, but I had also learned, and in a school

where the lessons were well driven home, that power and natural gifts

were, for a man in my position, practically worthless unless they were

supplemented and guaranteed. I had got to get myself certificated.

I don't know what certificates have come to mean nowadays, sometimes, I

fear, very little. They seem to me to have lowered the standard with the

utmost recklessness. I would not, in my own business, give a pound a

dozen for some of these artificially achieved successes that are offered

to me almost every day in the week, and it causes me no surprise

whatever when I see the highly certificated also unemployed.... But it

was rather different then. Once more I have forgotten my luck and railed

at the goddess. It was my luck to be certificated while certificates

still had a value, and for a year and a half I had drifted through my

occupation by day but worked with an almost demoniac energy by night in

order that I might not miss a single one of these tickets of

authenticity that it was possible for me to obtain. A First Honours in

Method would now complete my equipment.

And, looking back now, I wonder how much superstition there was in it

that I wanted all the changes I was planning to come at once. For I

meant that the break, when it did come, should be clean and final. As

long as I remained with Rixon Tebb & Masters' my wretched single room at

King's Cross was quite good enough for an agency clerk; when I left

Rixon Tebb & Masters' I would leave those quarters also. Until then, I

don't think you could have dragged me out, so strongly had I this

feeling. Superstition or what you like, it had, for me, the force of a

large and wise, if not yet fully worked out strategy. They tried, of

course, at the Business College in Holborn, just as they are now trying

at the new place in Kingsway, to teach us this larger generalship of

waiting, withholding, massing, concentration, and then the swift

development and advance; but I don't think it was much good. You don't

get these things in return for so many guineas a year in fees. But I

felt their stirrings then.... I hope I have made it plain that neither

at the place in Kingsway, nor in my sordid lodgings over the

public-house, nor under the arches of Somers Town that night, was I

wasting my time.

And now, like a match to all that I had prepared and was preparing, had

come the kindling thought of Evie Soames.

I remember I walked to Hampstead that night, revolving it all. Walking

always steadies me, and by the time I had reached the Lower Heath the

mechanical calculators at the new place in Kingsway do not work more

coldly and mathematically than my brain had begun to work. The

advantages I possessed, which had been the first thing to rush into my

head, I allowed for the present to take care of themselves; I now

envisaged my disadvantages.

You may imagine that these were terrifying.... I counted them, and was

unable to check my groans when, thinking I had come to the end of them,

yet another sprang up, stabbing me as it were from behind. They might

almost have been veritable assassins, springing out from behind the dark

bushes and copses near the Vale of Health among which I wandered....

Think of them! Think of them!

They, he and she, were of an age, or nearly; I seven years the senior of

the elder of them. They met on three days a week at the college, met

doubtless to snigger together over their "fun," only on three evenings

could I see her. Her people apparently knew his; she would go down to

Guildford, and my fancy might picture them, together there, taking

walks, telling stories over the fire, laughing at chance resemblances at

the Zoo. And all this time I should not cease for a moment to labour at

that garden of my ambition above the brown mould of which not a green

shoot yet showed. How (you must remember I was desperately facing the

worst that could happen and not the best)--how could they help but fall

in love? What would it be possible for me to do but to discover the

thing after it had happened? And when it had happened, what was there

then to be done?

But I need not force all this upon you. You will see for yourself. Look

at it, then, and tell me where you would have conceived the odds to

lie--with my possibly large-planning but certainly slow-executing brain,

or with them and their opportunities and luck and gifts of circumstance

and nature, demolishable singly perhaps, but well-nigh invincible in the

sum of them?

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

I returned from Hampstead at three o'clock in the morning. My horror of

red and green had long since been switched off, and I got into bed

during the only quiet interval that noisy and populous corner ever knew.

I had now balanced advantages and disadvantages together, and was

recapitulating the whole. Examining, setting aside, bringing forward

again to re-examine in other aspects, setting aside again, checking,

dismissing, estimating--my brain worked like a ticking instrument.

Clocks struck, but still I pondered; and I was as free from anger now

as if it had been another, not I, who had sought the support of the

railings in Mecklenburgh Square.

And there dominated all my machination the single thought, that by no

slip or carelessness or overlooked detail must they be made aware that

I was watching them as a masked thief watches the uneasy sleeper upon

the bed.

V

It was at Rixon Tebb & Masters' that I first began to know jealousy, or

at least the image of it. I find I must say a little more about this

place in which I spent my days at that time.

I have said that Polwhele hated me; but nobody loved anybody else at

Rixon Tebb & Masters'. I have worked in offices that have been not bad

fun at all; offices where the fellows formed a sort of family, as they

did afterwards at the Freight & Ballast Company, with something not

unlike the family bond, the family jokes, and an interchange each

morning of the adventures of the night before not unlike the exchange of

items of news from letters about a family breakfast-table; but there was

nothing like that at Rixon Tebb & Masters'. There, one of us could

scarcely glance up over the little brass rail at his desk-head without

seeing, across the spaces where the green porcelain cones of the

incandescents hung, another furtive pair of eyes meeting his own and

looking almost guiltily away again. If the partners despised us for our

cringing before them they were right; we were a despicable set. I don't

think a friendship was ever struck up in the place. We hated, if for no

other reason, than because each of us knew his neighbour to be as

contemptible as he knew himself to be.

It was in this atmosphere that I wrapped myself about with the thought

of Evie Soames. My routine work taxed my attention little; I could do it

as well as it needed to be done and live a whole free inner life at the

same time; and I was sometimes actually startled when, looking up after

some lapse and interim in which I had seen nothing but the shape of

Evie's birch-like neck and the brilliant motion of her eyes, I saw the

crafty gaze of a fellow-clerk on my face. Once I met Sutt's eyes in this

way; I knew his thought, namely, that he surmised the nature of mine;

and he smiled, a mean sort of smile. He didn't smile twice, though,

while I was there. I don't mean that I said or did anything, but I think

he knew what my look meant.... All the same there got about the

office--or rather about the corners and lavatories and behind screens,

for it never came nearer to me than that--the only joke I remember ever

to have been born there--the joke that Jeffries had all the appearance

of a man in love. I took the hint. Thenceforward, as far as I might, I

did not allow the faintest flicker of an emotion to cross my face. And

more than ever was I on my guard lest I should do so in a place where it

would have mattered more than it did at Rixon Tebb & Masters'.

Then, long before I knew of any valid grounds for them, and before a

brain less prospectively active than mine would as much as dreamed of

them, came these jealousies. Perhaps, like my occasional angers and like

that secret fragrant flame of my love, they were emotions at large,

unattached to any person but bound sooner or later to become so

attached, and already seeking a quarter in which to alight.

They wrung my heart. Hot flushes and rages sometimes came upon me with

no warning whatever. Sometimes in the middle of a column of figures or a

twelve-inch-high stack of addresses, a devil would slyly lift its

head--the thought that while I sat there polishing my trousers on a tall

stool and the wrist of my sleeve on my desk, he and my Evie

were--where?... I have in a remarkable degree that most precious and

most hideous of gifts, the gift of mental visualisation, at these times

it would have its way with me. I would see them in those moments where I

would and engaged how I would. Well nigh as clearly as I see the page

before me, I would see him, long boyish head and fair curly hair, red

waistcoat and cigarette, and turned-up trousers and all, now making

pretexts that something was wrong with her typewriter, now carrying a

specimen ledger for her, now choosing for himself a place from which he

could watch her, or even passing on to her the explanations of knots

and difficulties he had had the previous evening from myself. My fancy

(my reason at these times its helpless slave) would dog them--past the

general room into the lecture-room--thence to the back room where the

charts and apparatus were kept--thence back again through the lecture

room into the shorthand and typewriting and senior class rooms, and so

throughout every corner behind our three Holborn bow windows. There were

times when I used all my powers of concentration to see one of them

without the other, and failed.... And then the fit would pass and my

steady reason would reassert itself. I would tell myself I was a fool to

thrust knives into myself thus. She was merely that touchingly opening

fair young tree; and as for him, if his young male swaggerings in the

pride of his twenty-two years included any knowledge of girls at all,

they were probably girls of a very different class from hers.

Then would come the other damnable series again, and the sweat would

stand on my brow.

No wonder Sutt looked.

Yet I am not sure that, for the sake of certain purely heavenly hours, I

would not go through it all again. Would you suppose that in that

five-shilling room of mine, where I had to flatten myself against the

wall before I could take my clothes off unseen--or as I dined on

sausage and mashed at my reeking "pull-up"--or as I roamed the pavements

in search of the physical exhaustion that should bring sleep--would you

suppose that in these places and living this life I could have heavenly

hours? Ah, but I could, and had!... I don't want you to think I am

sentimentalising about it. The public-house downstairs had knocked a

good many ideas about the sanctity of our common humanity out of my

head. I never, in my fourpenny dining-place, looked at the drayman or

porter at the next table and wondered whether he also knew the heights

and abysses I knew. Doubtless he had or had had his own, but all is

_not_ comparative. There _are_ grades in heaven and hell. I knew I stood

out, exceptional, destined, marked for signal honour or for signal

dishonour. I had no desire to persuade anybody else of this. These

things are beyond proof. Attempt to prove them and you but prove their

opposites.

And so literally was this slender dark creature "my life," that often at

the college itself my resolution all but failed me. More (but not much

more) woman than child, she seemed at these times--what shall I

say?--not a wonder shrunk, but a receptacle strangely slight and tender

for the mighty things preparing for her. At such moments I found myself

looking years ahead--seeing many things over and behind us, and myself,

perhaps, turning my power elsewhere. And that moved me more than all

the rest. For my strength was ever being used for her. Service of her

was the law of it, as I now knew it had been its origin. I sometimes had

ado not to sob, when watching her young head bent over the page of a

text-book, images of great and brooding protection of enfolding and

strong and jealous wakefulness, filled my breast as I looked. I felt in

those moments that for every hair of her head I could have killed a man

and felt no compunction afterwards.

Evie caused me far more anxiety than Archie did. At all times Archie's

vanities, quite as amusing to watch as those of any young girl, would

blind him to much that lay an inch or two beyond the end of his nose. He

was, moreover, deep in his examination work, and I had no doubt that,

once the examinations were over, he would indulge himself in a mild

little "burst" and flatter his seraphic self he was rather a devil in

his way. But she was more difficult. For one thing, hers was a richer

nature. She had, or would presently have, far more to give; and already

I saw that, as surely as Miss Windus was one of Life's takers, Evie

Soames was one of Life's givers.

I watched--how I watched!--for the slightest of her unconscious

betrayals; and, of course, by dint of watching I was able to find a

thousand that presently vanished again. I drew trifling tremendous

conclusions from the merest nothings. She could not make a gawky,

captivating little movement but I would found something upon it, not a

pretty coltish gesture but I had my inference to draw. The smile,

perhaps, where lately the laugh would have been--the little check of

recollection, even as she was perching herself with a tomboyish swing on

the edge of a table, that she "was grown-up now"--slight little

ceremoniousnesses, stilted little phrases and momentary forgettings

again--I missed not one of these. My lovely, lovely flapper! Did you

know that you were twenty different creatures in a week, each beyond

words adorable until another swelling nodule yielded and allowed a peep

of a yet inner tender and rosy heart?

Of course I see now that I was far too clever in all this. I had, in

fact, taken the course that was least of all likely to tell me what I

wanted to know. For, as a face seen daily shows no change and yet grows

relentlessly older, so, because of my watching, she changed under my

eyes and my eyes did not tell me she had changed. I have had in my time

various things to say about "woman's intuition." I, like the rest of us,

have set half of it down as guessing and the other half (the half that

events falsify) as a convenient forgetfulness. Well, I hope I make

amends when I admit now that in all this I owed my final enlightenment

to a woman, and to the woman to whom I would least of all have been

indebted--to Miss Windus.

It was on a Friday evening that this enlightenment came to me. Fridays

were ever a pain to me, because of the three whole days that must

elapse--five if she failed to appear on the Monday evening--before I

could see Evie again. Believe me, the last minutes of those Friday

evenings always cost me dearly in emotion; and in order that I might

make the most of them I had some time before discontinued a former habit

of mine--that of working in the senior students' classroom. By so doing

I had forestalled any remarks on the fact that I was frequently to be

found in the same room as Evie. And even then I knew I was lucky to

escape Miss Levey's Hebrew intensiveness.

But on that Friday night I was restless. An absurd trifle had unsettled

me (but I have told you how much such trifles meant to me)--nothing more

than an alteration in Evie's way of arranging her hair. Until then it

had been drawn back and massed in a thick little clump on her nape,

showing beautifully the small round of her head; but now she had parted

it (I did not think altogether more becomingly) in the middle, and had

evidently been making desperate attempts to "wave" it. Certainly the

change gave her at once a more adult air, which I supposed I should get

used to, unless, as was likely, she changed it again in the following

week. Her blouse also was new. It had a high lace collar up to her ears,

and I didn't like it in the least. It was mere concealment, without

concealment's charm.

I was restless. I had begun the evening by working, for once, in the

senior classroom again; but presently, not happy where I was and not

wishing to go straightway into the lecture-room where Evie sat, I had

compromised by packing up my things and going into the room adjoining

hers--the general room. The reference books were kept in the general

room, and, presently, having need of one of these, I had crossed to the

shelf and taken it down.

I ought to explain that these books were kept in three projecting bays,

such as one sees in libraries, that stood out at right angles from the

wall. Thus the books of each projecting wing faced both ways and between

the bays there was just room enough for the short library ladder of

three or four steps with the vertical staff to steady yourself by as you

stood on it. As I could easily reach any book there without the ladder,

I had passed the bay that contained it, and had taken up my place on the

farther side of the wing nearest the window, where I stood with the open

book in my hand. I forget what the book was.

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

compartment.

I had no great interest in either of these women--I may say none, since

I could not see Miss Causton's fluent hand; so, merely noting their

arrival, I was continuing my reading when suddenly I heard the name of

Evie Soames. It was Miss Windus who was speaking.

"... Oh, I suppose so; in her way, of course--if that's all men want!"

she was saying. "Don't you think?" This with a little acidulous rising

inflection.

Then I heard Miss Causton's indolent voice in reply. From the way in

which she spoke I fancied she was eating sweets. It had lately struck me

that she ate more sweets than both the other girls together, and if it

wasn't sweets it was something else.

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

creatures want."

"Of course not. They do seem to want such--odd--things. The way I'm

looked at sometimes--I declare it makes me feel perfectly ashamed!" said

Miss Windus. Why she said it I don't know. It was the purest hypocrisy,

and it was not likely to impose on Miss Causton, who had a nonchalant,

still humour of her own.... But on second thoughts I don't know. I was

not always sure, afterwards, when I got to know Miss Windus better, that

she didn't really labour under some such delusion as this.

"Do they?" Miss Causton asked lazily. "They don't worry me much. So long

ago since I've seen one that I've nearly forgotten."

There was a short pause, then:

"Really, they stare so," Miss Windus continued, "look one so out of

countenance--one really doesn't know which way to turn!"

"No?" came Miss Causton's ironical dawdle. "Oh ... with a chance, my

dear ... _I_ should!" ... I suppose she smiled as she said it. While

appearing to lay herself perfectly open she had far more to hide than

Miss Windus had.

Miss Windus was shocked.

"You _dreadful_ girl!... But really Louie, you must have noticed it.

Why, you can see it the moment she comes into the room!"

"Really?" came the other detached voice. "How quaint!... Who do you

think she's after? Not the Baboon?..."

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

myself.

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

memory powder!..."

"Oh, I call it baboon," Miss Causton remarked with indifference. Then

she laughed.... "How ridiculous you are! He's as big as a man ought to

be anyway----"

"Oh, quite!"

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

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

"Really, you are absurd!..."

There was another short silence.

"And by the way," Miss Windus next said, "_he's_ been rather--different

somehow--lately, don't you think?"

Sweets crunched for a moment, then:

"Different?... Do you mean _he's_ been looking at you in

that--ahem!--dreadful way?"

"What, _that_ creature!..."

"Beg yours, dear----"

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

same----"

"Well, anything for a change, as the song says. Myself, if I found I

couldn't get along without 'em, I should prefer----"

But a "Sssh!" interrupted Miss Causton. Somebody had come into the

farther bay, and the rest for a time was whispering.

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

changed.

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

"One must keep oneself clean," Miss Causton threw off. "Have some of

this, dear. I simply had to have some chocolate nougat to-night!..."

There was a rustling of tissue paper.

"Well, it's a sign, and so's her hair-waving and polishing her nails and

that lace yoke," Miss Windus resumed.

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

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

You see that I was quite deliberately listening. I am not putting on any

airs about it. I might have been Polwhele. I wanted to know, so I

listened. I did more than listen too. I watched. I knew that the shelves

were only half full on the other side; only a screen of stout wire

separated the books facing one way from those facing the other; and by

pulling out a book or two on my side I should probably find a

peephole.... Very softly I pulled three or four out, found my opening

and looked. Miss Causton appeared to be standing with her back towards

me; I couldn't see her; but I could see Miss Windus, sitting on the

library ladder holding its short staff, with her plaid skirt pulled

tightly about one carrot-shaped thigh.

They began to talk again.

"And another thing that makes me _quite_ sure, dear! She's going to

young Merridew's next week-end!"

"Oh!..."

"Don't be absurd. You know what I mean. To his parents', of course; they

live in Guildford.... Not that _she_ told me, oh no! Not her ladyship!"

"Who did, then?"

"Not her, though I gave her _every_ chance! Six months ago she'd have

told me like a shot, but we're getting so blessed artful these days!...

He told me."

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

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

"Thanks. I think I should know which way to turn in _that_ case," Miss

Causton replied evenly. "Coming?"

And they left the bay together.

It was by this admirable piece of Rixon Tebb & Masters' work that I

learned what, it appeared, I had been watching too closely to see.

VI

I had intended in any case to spend the remainder of that evening with

Archie Merridew. Mingled with my restlessness there had been a tremulous

sensitiveness that had culminated half-an-hour before in a fit of

satanic pride. Lately (I had decided) it had come to be taken rather too

much as a matter of course that our frequent adjournments after the

evening class should be always to his quarters and never, or hardly

ever, to mine. I had quite enough to bear without further gratuitous

rubs of that kind, and I had resolved that I would make myself his host

that evening though he had lived in a mansion and I in a sty.

But after what I had so altogether discreditably overheard now I had

fifty other reasons for wishing him to come along with me. Almost every

sentence that had been spoken on the other side of that bay of books had

contained a reason. But I realised that before I could trust myself to

face him I must swallow the anger that crowded thickly into my throat.

There was nothing to gain and everything to lose by letting him see my

rage. So I walked back into the empty senior classroom, there to remain

until I should have got the worst of it over.

By half-past nine I had got myself in hand. I gathered my work together.

Students were coming to the row of washbowls in the small compartment at

the end of the senior classroom to wash their hands, and Evie gave me

the smile that was to be my nourishment for three whole days as she

passed with her towel and the cake of soap in the new celluloid box.

Archie had been working all the evening in the typewriting-room; now was

my chance, before he could make (supposing him to want to make) any

appointment with her, to secure this myself, and I hurried for my hat

and coat and sought him.

"Ready?" I said.

"Right-oh; just a minute," he replied. "I told 'em to keep my fire

in--I'm going to swot like blazes to-night."

"Oh no--you're coming along with me this time," I laughed. "I shall be

ashamed to show my face at your place much oftener ... unless," I added

lest he should shake me off, "you love me merely for what I have----"

He laughed too. He was at the young and squab-like stage that takes a

pride in scorning appearances, and even finds the heart more rather than

less honest when the waistcoat over it is shabby. He accepted with quite

a good grace, got his hat and coat, and we went out together, I giving

Miss Windus an unimpeachable "Good-night" as I passed her, hardly a

yard from the spot where I had peeped on her less than an hour before.

The electrograph opposite my abode was an advertisement of "_Sarcey's

Fluid_," some sort of a disinfectant; and as we approached it Archie

looked up.

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

It did not seem to me to "need it" quite so badly that evening as it had

on some other evenings--warm summer evenings, for example--I had known.

December had come in rawly, and the chestnut stoves and baked-potato

engine were out. The poorer streets have no pleasanter smell than that

of baked potatoes, broken up, sprinkled with salt from the big tin

caster, and closed together again like a South Sea face with a mealy

smiling mouth, and I had slipped a couple of these into my pocket for

our supper. I suppose Archie meant the fried fish papers in the gutters

and (as we entered by my side door) the acrid smell of the public-house;

but it was part of my fiendish pride to rub those things in a little

that evening, and I made light of them as we mounted the stairs.

"Oh, you're pampered, Master Archie," said I. "I had thought of asking

you round to supper next Saturday evening--not to-morrow, a week

to-morrow--but I think I shall save my hospitality."

You see what I was already angling for. Well, I caught my fish. Of

course he couldn't take Evie down to his folks at Guildford without my

knowing of it, but I wanted to see the fashion in which he would make

his avowal. We had left the carpeted corner of the stairs that the great

ornamental public-house lamp illuminated brightly and were standing on

the bare landing outside my room. He answered without an instant's

hesitation.

"Afraid you'll have to, Jeff--twice over," he replied. "I've got to go

down home that week-end; beastly nuisance! I was going with some fellows

over to Richmond--stag-party; but the mater writes that she's asked Miss

Soames, so I suppose I shall have to be there to help out--confound it!"

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

"Oh?" I remarked casually. "Nice change for you. You'll be all the

fitter for the exams. Don't tell _me_ about your stag-parties though. I

know 'em; you'd take jolly good care not to pick the place with the

plainest waitresses for tea, what? _I_ know you!... But if I were you

I'd go steady for a week or two, my boy, that Method paper'll be harder

than you think, I warn you!"

"I'm watching it!" he replied cheerfully. "By Jove! Jeff, I'd forgotten

what a noisy pitch this of yours is! What on earth makes you stay

here?"

"Oh, I don't know," I replied carelessly, applying a match to the wick

of my lamp and replacing the chimney. "As I say, you're pampered. The

place is all right. I don't do much except sleep here. It's a bit cold,

though. I'd keep my coat on if I were you----"

"Wouldn't be much sleep for me here," he remarked, sitting on the edge

of my bed. "I should want a good stiff drink before I slept much in this

racket!"

As I placed the lamp globe on its brass ring I glanced covertly at him.

It was a green interval, and his face looked as if he stood by a

chemist's window near the big pear-shaped green globe, while his

waistcoat was turned to a black purple, with one brass button gleaming

green as a cat's eye. Then the red came again, and the lamp flame crept

up. I went to the little cupboard where I kept my few cups and saucers

and plates. I filled my kettle at the tap on the landing, put it on the

half-crown oil-stove, and began to prepare our feast.

In a quarter of an hour it was ready--tea, the baked potatoes, and a

wedge of butter apiece. We ate it, he sitting on my bed, I in my sagging

and string-mended old wicker chair. I saw quite plainly that already he

wanted to be off, and would stay no longer than the barest decency

demanded; but he had got to eat that pauper's meal before I let him go,

and there were my forty-nine other reasons for having got him up there.

One of these other reasons had, during the last hour, taken complete

shape in my mind. Its consequences would have been impossible to

foresee, but as far as it yet went, I thought it crafty enough. I

filched another look at him; he was burning the roof of his mouth with

hot potato as he lolled against my bed foot; and I judged it time to put

my plan into execution.

I pushed my own plate away and sank back into my lifeless old wicker

chair. He had turned his coat collar up by this time. My plan kept me

warm.

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

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

looked up.

"How?" he asked.

I settled myself farther back.

"How!" I repeated almost vindictively. "Don't you call it lucky having a

house and people and so on?"

"Oh! Everybody has----" he began, but corrected himself. "I mean, I

thought you meant some special luck!"

"Oh no--just that," I murmured. "Having a place to ask people down to

when you want--that's all."

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

"Miss----?" I shook my head absently. "Oh no, I wasn't thinking of Miss

Soames--I was thinking of something quite different."

He meditated for a moment.

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

looking squarely at me.

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

briefly this:

When, over the case of reference books, I had heard Miss Windus make the

very remark he also had just made--namely, that I had been

"different"--I had had a swift access of alarm. In what particular I had

betrayed myself I didn't know, but I realised very clearly, and doubly

clearly now that the same remark had dropped from Archie himself, that

love and a light cannot be hid, and that if my extreme former care had

not secured me from remark no care I was likely to be able to take for

the future would do so. I had laid myself open, and should do so again.

How was I to cover myself?

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

Were I to give it out to Archie--or rather, not so much to give it out

as allow a surmise to dawn on him--that my heart was already pre-engaged

in some carefully unspecified quarter or other, not only would this

"difference," both he and Miss Windus had remarked on, be admitted and

accounted for, but I should at one stroke set myself free from a hundred

other trammels of gossip, past, present and to come. After that avowal

nothing I did would be unaccountable. I should have a definite place in

the general sex-understanding. I should be classed, out of the running,

filed and docketed, totally uninteresting to either Miss Windus or Miss

Causton and rid of the attentions of Miss Levey.

And I should also--my heart had thrilled suddenly and poignantly as I

thought of this--I should also be admitted at once to privileges. I

should have my share in such freedoms and exemptions as the married man

knows fully and the attached bachelor at least to a probationary extent.

This state of things does by tacit acknowledgment exist. The man who can

say all to one woman can say more than other men to all women. And the

shining immunity I now saw before me would even include what so far I

had had to deny myself--conversation, thus safeguarded, with Evie

herself.

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

And instantly a perfect seething of the cautions and reserves with which

I must do it sprang up in my brain.

But here was Archie patiently waiting for me to speak.

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

I let my head drop, as a man might who discovers he has said too much.

"Oh, nothing," I replied.

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

be.

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

suspiciously.

The next moment he had looked hard into my face, taken a long breath,

and, suddenly bringing his hand down on his thigh, broken into loud

laughter.

"By Jove! Jeff--I really believe--let's have a look at you--by Jove! I

really do--_I believe you're in love_! What a----How ripping, I mean!

Best congratulations, old chap--my turn this time--ha ha ha ha!"

I drew myself heavily up. The kind of thing I was doing has to be done

rather carefully. "Look here, Archie--" I began, trembling between the

wrath I felt and the not-too-much wrath I must appear to display; but he

interrupted me:

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

"Why not?" I demanded sharply.

"Oh, I didn't mean that!" he made such haste to say that it was plain as

a pikestaff that he had meant precisely "that."

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

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

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

"No," I replied; but a "No" that so exquisitely contradicted itself that

I gave myself nothing less than admiration for the performance.

"No?" he echoed. "You're lying, Jeff--you _are_!" he broke out

triumphantly. "I can tell by the way you say it! So _that's_ it! Dashed

if I didn't think there was something!... Who is she, Jeff?"

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

Neither was it part of that plan to enjoin either secrecy or the other

thing upon him. That, I thought grimly, might quite safely be left to

take care of itself. "Mandrill, my dear; you really must take a memory

powder!..." I seemed to hear Miss Windus' voice again over the

bookshelves. Oh yes, if he would give currency to that Zoo nonsense he

could be trusted not to keep the richer joke, of Jeffries in love, to

himself!

For that he and not Evie had been responsible for this pleasantry at

the expense of my appearance I had concluded by a much sounder

process of observation and reasoning than that my love-lorn state

predisposed me entirely in her favour. My watching, a failure in

other respects, had at least succeeded in this respect. And that I

had found had not been without its barb for me. You may remember my

former pathetic gratitude that, while others singled me out for

marked treatment, she alone had not, in the trifling forms and

observances that are the gracious outside of intercourse as distinct

from its inner truth, differentiated me from the rest of the world.

Well, I had made a guess at the reason for that. It was, in a word,

her upbringing. The aunt with whom she lived in Woburn Place had

taught her to "behave nicely," and so on. I could see that education.

Such maxims as that one must not "judge by appearances," that

"handsome is that handsome does," and, generally speaking, the

unexceptional tradition that the "less fortunately circumstanced"

have special claims on superior gentleness and pity, form almost the

whole of it. I, it appeared, was one of these "less fortunately

circumstanced".... Of course nobody was to blame. By-and-by the

amiable aunt would probably go a little further, and teach her that

it is not enough that these unimpeachable precepts should be merely

observed, but that the thought behind them must be concealed as well.

When you treat a poor devil just as if he was anybody else you must

not let it be seen that you do so from perception that he is not....

Anyway, there it was, and it rather took the shine out of that

"good-night, Mr Jeffries" that had sent me off happy to Archie's

rooms on the evening when I had been so startlingly shaken out of my

fool's paradise.

Thus I was persuaded, and as it turned out quite rightly, that it had

been young Merridew, and not she, who had allowed his tongue this

licence both on Weston's physical characteristics and my own.

His cup of tea was still on the floor, and by this time was cold. He

hadn't tasted it, and, his renewed congratulations on what he supposed

to be my blissful state of mind over, was once more fidgeting to be off.

But it was quite at my own pleasure whether I released him or not; I had

the hateful advantage of my baked potatoes and my poverty; and though he

was getting colder moment by moment, being less accustomed to the lack

of a fire than I, I did not spare him.

"Yes," I remarked musingly by-and-by, as if I had been thinking over a

former remark, "I'd take that Method paper quite seriously if I were

you. Save up your little fling till that's over. Stag-parties and work

don't go together, my son."

He had a little gleam of perspicacity. "What little fling?" he asked.

"Who said I was going to have one?"

("Carefully, Jeffries," I cautioned myself.) Aloud I said cheerfully,

"My mistake, Archie--I'm out of the running in these things--I'm rather

a Puritan by necessity, you see. Perhaps I was taking it rather for

granted----"

He chuckled. "A Puritan by necessity! A Puritan by Miss

Whatever-her-name-is, more like! Do at least tell us if it's anybody we

know, Jeff!"

But I ignored the latter part of his remark. "Well done, Archie," I

applauded. "I'm glad you see that when a man's got one woman he's no

need for all the others. Stick to that and you're all right."

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

said.

I made no reply.

You need not conclude, unless you wish, that I wanted to start him

straight away to the devil. I couldn't have ensured his arrival at that

destination if I had. But I was prepared to go half way with him if by

so doing I could keep him from getting into paradise by the means I had

reserved for myself. I was doing him no conspicuous harm. He would have

to rub shoulders with the world before long--was already doing so; and I

said no more to him--nay, I said far less--than he would have picked up

for himself in almost any gathering of young men of his own age that he

was likely to find himself among.... So presently, when after (how

shall I put it?)--after having tapped it home that there _was_ the one

woman and also the others, I returned to the examination in Method

again, I was talking as easily as if, his betrayals to Miss Windus

notwithstanding, we had been the best friends in the world.

"By the way, that's another thing you're lucky in, my boy," I said. "The

exam's in the daytime. I suppose that doesn't convey anything to you."

"How do you mean?"

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

"Well?" he inquired.

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

He stared. "You don't mean to say they'd be such skunks as not to let

you off for a day!" he exclaimed.

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

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

He was as ignorant about Rixon Tebb & Masters as he was about everything

else in life.

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

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

back to swot."

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

come down with you----"

Before I turned down my lamp, filling the room with the red and green

again, I noticed his untouched cup of tea on the floor. I made no remark

on it, but as I preceded him down the narrow stairs I found myself

suddenly filled with a curiosity as to whether I guessed rightly what

was passing in his mind. I had made my shot, and was as interested to

know whether it was a true one as if I had had a bet on it.

Where the great public-house lamp shone brightly through the landing

window the stairs branched, one flight descending to the side door by

which we had entered and the other leading to the back bar of the

public-house. It was as we reached this bifurcation that I found I had

guessed rightly.

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

I shook my head.

"Not here," I said. "Not on my own premises, so to speak. If you don't

mind my having something thin I'll come over the way with you."

"Anywhere," he said, with another shiver.

There was another public-house just beyond the _Sarcey's Fluid_

advertisement. We crossed and entered it.

"Rum--hot!" he called familiarly, peering under the frame of pivoted

glass panes and flipping on the counter with a florin to attract the

barmaid's attention. "Come along, Flossie--hurry up!... What's your

poison, Jeff?"

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

VII

His incredible gaucheries apart, I had no reason for hating him. One

does not hate a youngster seven years one's junior merely because he is

a mass of inexperience and self-sufficiency. Once again my hate was

really a hatred of the whole dreary circumstances of my life, and, when

I saw this concentrating stormily over young Merridew's head, I made

attempt after attempt to divert it. I swear to you I made these

attempts. I made them first of all to save him from a contest so unequal

as one with my wrath must be; and if I made them later so that I myself

should not be merely the slave of that wrath, I still made them. And all

the time, as I say, so long as he did not stand in my way, it was a

matter of indifference to me whether he took the upward path or that

which led downhill to perdition.

Unfortunately I was in love, and no man in love can stand by the rules

that he knows ought to govern his conduct. Those jealousies I have

spoken of as torturing me at Rixon Tebb & Masters' shook me in spite of

myself. When I felt their approach I took care to give young Merridew a

wide berth; and I confess that in sometimes letting these fits have

their way with me I found an abominable ease. Away from him, my heart

was filled with rage and revilings; but these very outbreaks enabled me

at other times to meet him with a smile on my lips and a welcome in my

eyes. Once I had got rid of the over-plus of my rage I could almost have

persuaded myself of my affection for him.

So I alternated, as the red and green of my apartment alternated; and

perhaps the red seemed redder and the green greener by the mere force of

the contrast. I continued to walk home frequently with him after the

class, to share his supper frequently, and to be obliged to him for my

necessary bath.

I very soon learned that in the matter of my reputed being in love he

had done exactly what I had intended he should do--had whispered the

news about the college. It required no further eavesdropping to tell me

that; I felt it in the altered air. I saw the knowledge peering through

the little scalene triangles of Miss Windus' eyes, saw it in the looks

of sleepy and amused curiosity with which Miss Causton favoured me. The

latter lady, indeed, sometimes positively alarmed me, for the glances I

suffered when I chanced to enter a room in which she was at work held

incalculable things, and I no longer dared to look at her own amused and

supercilious eyes, her fascinating hands, or that foot beneath the hem

of her dress, fine and slender as a violin. And with the least

encouragement Miss Windus would, I knew, have sought my company, and,

lacking an admirer of her own, would have eased her breast to somebody

else's of all the things about love at large that she ached to say to

somebody. I wondered, seeing them both, whether there was no middle way

with women. The whole sex seemed to be divided into creatures (or rather

a creature, for I set Evie apart) to be enskied by men, and the other

kind, that a man might fly as he would fly a wild animal. And I am not

sure even now that when these two things are found in one and the same

woman they ever really shake down together. They seem to go on existing,

independently, unreconciled, side by side.

But Miss Levey was far worse. She always seemed to me to crave

information, useful or useless, from a mere acquisitiveness; and I may

say now that it was she who, later, first roused in me the uneasy

suspicion that unless I was exceedingly careful I should find that I had

undertaken more than I could well manage. She began all at once to show

quite a liking for my company. She mislaid books in the room where I

sat, got into difficulties with copying presses when I was about, and

glanced up at open or closed windows too high for her reach, as if she

felt a draught or the lack of air, it didn't matter which, and must

suffer until somebody came to her help. All this had its rise in the

idlest curiosity, unless, as I sometimes suspected, she had made a bet

that she would get out of me who this imaginary _fiancee_ of mine was,

and was determined to win it. One day as I saw her struggling with the

blind cords in one of the window bays, and advanced to her assistance,

she relinquished the cords, and then, as if to apologise for the trouble

she was causing me, said, "Oh, thank you so much--you see I'm going to a

dance to-night, and have a slight cold already.... You don't go to

dances, do you, Mr Jeffries?" I answered that I did not, whereupon she

said gaily, "Oh, you must learn! I'm sure you could find _some_body who

would teach you! Then you and your partner could join our set--such

fun!"

And another time she actually came to me with tickets for one of her

"hops," and pointed out to me that I should be saving a shilling by

taking both a pink ticket as well as a blue one.

But while these were the results of my whispered false intelligence on

Miss Windus and Miss Causton and Miss Levey, the results on Evie Soames

were both foreseen and unforeseen. I had foreseen that it would give me

a new liberty with her; but I had not foreseen that she, and not I,

would be the first to take advantage of that liberty. It came to me

entirely as a surprise that she should see no reason why, if my heart

was engaged, she should not speak of it as a matter of course to

myself.

This, to my great confusion, she did.

It was in the small back room that we called the library, among the

book-shelves and glass-cases of mimeographs and gelatine copiers and

patent tills, that she did so. I had seen her talking to Weston in the

empty lecture-room as I had passed through to restore a book to its

place--a new translation of "Schmoller on the Mercantile System," I

remember it was--and she had turned as I had passed. I think she had

been a little nervous about the pretty little exhibition she intended.

It wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that she had actually

practised the words she was going to use, and I am quite sure she meant

to go through it creditably. My lady was even then looking forward to

the time when, on a small scale or a large one, she would have to do

these things. So she followed me into the library, and, with one slender

hand on the iron ball-arm of the copying press under the gas said her

little piece.

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

For a moment I did not take her meaning. Then it dawned on me, and I

felt a quick constriction of my heart that was both bliss and pain.

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

it.

She wore a brown cloth tailor-made costume and a thick knitted cap of

white wool; and the shadow of this cap over her large eyes was not so

deep but that I saw the almost reproachful look in them. It was almost

as if she echoed: "'On what?' Can such a wonderful thing have happened

to you and you ask 'On what?'"

"On this we hear of your engagement," she replied, looking down at her

toes. "It's--it's true, isn't it?"

For the second time I felt my facile invention sitting somewhat less

easily on me. I stammered again, while she, I am quite sure,

misattributed my embarrassment.

"Who told you that?"

At that she was sweetly arch.

"Oh, a little bird, Mr Jeffries! Don't tell me it isn't true--it would

be almost--almost like bad luck----"

"Bad luck?" I repeated foolishly.

"I mean, like wearing your wedding dress before the day, or something

like that--congratulating you too soon, I mean----"

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

Instantly her face fell adorably. In its expression I fancied I detected

both indignation against her misinformant and mortification that her

dear little attempt at social competence had failed.

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

colour. "Please forgive me!"

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

married."

Like a flash she was all eagerness again. She had a book in her hand,

not a college text-book but a novelette; and probably the whole of the

novelette was in her glad change of tone. I was not exactly engaged to

be married, but I _was_ in love, and I daresay her brain was already a

jumble of surmises about obstinate parents, secret wills, _marriages de

convenance_, and true and severed young hearts.

"Oh!" she said again. "I'm so--I mean I hope I shall soon be able to--I

mean I hope I'm not rude if I----" She floundered, already out of her

depth.

"Not at all," I said gravely. "I only said I was not formally engaged.

There are--other reasons for congratulation after all----"

"Oh, then I _do_!" she cried impulsively, with a grateful look that I

had helped her out. "I'm _so_ glad!"

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

But a daring impulse seized me. This was on a Friday night, and I knew

that on the morrow she was going to Guildford.

"I see you're just leaving," I said. "Would it annoy you if I were to

walk a little way with you?"

Again the code of her upbringing banished her momentary hesitation.

"Unless," I said, "you have already----"

"Oh no!" she said, with quick frankness. "I only meant that I nearly

always go alone, or else with Miss Windus."

"I'm sure Miss Windus can spare you for once. One doesn't get

congratulated like this every day," I pressed.

She laughed merrily. "Some of us don't get it at all," she said. "With

pleasure, Mr Jeffries."

I slapped Schmoller back into his place on the shelf, and went off,

drunk with bliss, to get my hat and coat.

That night I walked with Evie for the first time to Woburn Place. Never

had the Bloomsbury streets seemed so short, never the east side of the

British Museum so few paces in length. I remember very little of what we

talked about, I know she spoke of her visit to Guildford. The

invitation, she gave me to understand, was really to her aunt, and it

was to the subject of her aunt that she quickly returned when I

insinuated a mention of Archie's name. I insinuated it again a minute

later, but after that, noticing the way in which she came back to the

aunt again, I forbore.

"But I'm afraid we can't ask the Merridews back, as we ought," she said,

once more socially prescient. "We only have rooms in Woburn Place, you

see, and you can't very well ask people all that way just to rooms, can

you?"

"No," I replied briefly. I was thinking of my own late hospitality to

Archie.

"We used to have a house, of course, before uncle died, and you know how

poky rooms seem after that."

"Yes," I replied, compressing my lips.

And so we chatted. I forget what our other subjects were. I left her,

with our first hand-shake, at her door.

What that week-end was to me I will not attempt to tell you. I did not

belong to this earth at all. The fact that actually, in her person, she

was enjoying herself in Archie's company at Guildford was nothing to me;

the fact that every fibre of me was rapturously tremulous at the thought

of her was everything. I triumphed as if I already had her yielding in

my arms. Archie?... In my possession I laughed. I even felt kindly to

Archie--felt towards him that it would give me pleasure to have him,

by-and-by, a quite frequent visitor at my house--our house.... I spread

the mantle of my exaltation over the draymen and porters of the place

where I dined. Their heavens were not mine, but if a man is full he is

full, and I allowed them sanctities of their own. My heart was soft and

generous to them. For the first time in my life I knew what folk mean

when they say they love all the world.

The sweet influence had not quite left me when on Monday night I went to

the college to see her again.

She did not appear that night. Neither did he.

It was Wednesday before I saw her again.

I do not know what damnable difference in me that absence of the pair of

them for a single evening made. It came over me so suddenly that I was

in its clutches before I was aware. It was a significant transformation.

Let me relate it.

I knocked at the brass knocker of Archie's ivy-green door an hour before

the class on the Tuesday night, and found that he intended to work at

home that evening. (I only learned this, however, some minutes later.) I

had had a double reason for calling on him at that hour, and the blood

comes hot again in my cheeks as I recall my second reason. I had

recently bought a new suit of clothes, not in Lamb's Conduit Street, but

made, though cheaply enough, to measure; and though it was only the

beginning of the week one of the payments for this suit had already

depleted my pocket almost to the last penny. Since breakfast that day I

had not eaten. But I knew the hour at which Archie dined.

So nicely had I hit the moment for my self-invitation that I actually

followed his hot dinner half-way up the stairs. It was only on the first

landing that the servant stood aside with the tray to allow me to

precede her. I knocked at his door and entered, leaving the door open

for the dinner of which I intended to partake to follow.

He had brought a fowl back with him from Guildford, with one or two

other motherly gifts, and I smelt the white sauce even before Jane put

the tray down on a side table. Archie was in his brown dressing-gown,

standing before his fire. He had taken the green shade from his lamp,

and his low-ceilinged roof-chamber looked exceedingly ruddy and

comfortable and home-like.

"Hallo! Good man!" he cried. "You're just in time--I was just funking

carving--you'd better be getting your hand in for when you're a family

man!... Bring another plate, Jane.... Well, how's things?"

It was then that the thing happened that still has power to bring the

blood to my cheeks. It was exquisitely cruel in the moment of its

coming.

"Oh, so-so," I replied carelessly.... "But I've just this minute

swallowed my dinner, thanks. You go ahead. I'll watch you."

"Oh, rubbish!" he replied, in a tone that hardened me. "I'll lay you

haven't had so much but you can pick a bit of Surrey fowl."

I damned the thickness of his hide, but swallowed my choler.

"Really, thanks," I said, turning away to look at a print on the wall

that I had seen a hundred times before.

Jane hesitated. It was a long way up from the kitchen, and the old

bell-pull of red rope by his fireplace didn't always ring. "Shall I

bring the other plate, Mr Merridew?" she asked.

"Yes--bring it--he'll change his mind!"

But in my hellish pride I had now no intention whatever of changing my

mind. Twice again he pressed me, and twice I declined, the second time

curtly; and he fell to himself, while I sat in a chair and watched him.

"Oh, by the way," he said suddenly, with his mouth full of food, "I'm

going to work here to-night.... Sure you won't have some pudding?"

I rose. "Oh, well, if you're not coming I'll sheer off; why didn't you

say so? Enjoy your week-end?"

"Oh, first rate. But, dash it all, don't be in such a hurry--you're far

too early yet."

"Oh, I've just remembered something," I said, "See you again soon."

And I waved my hand and left.

I did not go to the class either that night. I was raging again, and

trying to protect that young fool from the injury of my savage thoughts.

I failed completely. Not even the thought that my passionate resentment

was a force to be confined as it were in a boiler, and only to be

allowed to escape by the way that would prove effective, restrained me

from clenching my fists and gritting my teeth as I recalled the image of

his pretty and ignorant and conceited face; and I am afraid I "let go"

utterly. I walked by way of Chancery Lane and Bouverie Street to the

Embankment; I crossed Blackfriars Bridge, and after that I don't quite

know where I went, trying to forget my hunger, and trying to shake off

my hideous grudge against the world that threatened to crash over the

head of the egotistical whipper-snapper I had left.

I have related this at some length because it was the first time, but

not the last, that that devil of sensitiveness took me in quite that

way.

VIII

I had not exaggerated when I told Archie Merridew that I might find some

difficulty in obtaining from Rixon Tebb & Masters' leave of absence for

the day of the Method examination. That examination was fixed for a

Friday, a fortnight and some days after my refusal to set fork into that

fragrantly steaming Surrey fowl of Archie Merridew's, and this falling

on a Friday added to my difficulties.

Or rather I should say that it added to Polwhele's difficulties, for it

was to Polwhele I looked once more to find a way out for me. For Friday

was a wage-day, and since I must have my eighteen shillings in order to

live, a mere covering of my absence would not suffice. The cashier would

have to be taken into the arrangement.

But Polwhele had by now to some extent got over his dread, if not over

his hatred, of me. When I put the matter to him he refused. This was in

the street, during the luncheon hour. The louse refused to help me, and

turned away.

Exactly fifteen minutes later I had bearded the cashier himself,

catching him at the door as he was returning from his meal.

At first he looked at me as much as to say, "Did _I_ speak to _you"_?

Then, finding it impossible to pretend he didn't know who I was, he

said, "What is it?"

I told him what I wanted, concealing only my reason for wanting it; and,

after his first astonishment that I had taken the absolutely

unprecedented course of addressing a request otherwise than through the

usual channel, I found him not unmanageable. As a matter of fact, things

were slack, and there was only one kind of labour that Rixon Tebb &

Masters' would have preferred to that it had from the agency at eighteen

shillings a week--namely, a "floating margin" waiting on the pavement to

be taken on for an hour or two as it might be required. Gayns saw a

chance of saving a day.

"You don't expect to be paid for that day, do you?" he said.

"No," I replied.

He thought for a moment. "All right," he said. "You can come for your

fifteen shillings on Thursday night."

And Polwhele set another mark against me, that I had approached a

superior over his head.

As I entered the Business College at half-past ten on the morning of the

examination it suddenly struck me that I had never been inside the

place in the daytime before. By gaslight it was, as I have said, dingy

enough, but by daylight it was shabby in the extreme. I walked round the

rooms, noticing for the first time that the shorthand and typewriting

rooms, which looked on the side street to the east of the block, were by

far the lightest rooms on our top floor, and that the library in which I

had received Evie's congratulations was little more than a thick

twilight, which the cleaning of the single grimy back window that looked

out over yards and chimney-pots would probably not greatly have

improved. The room adjoining that, the old ledger-room, was not, except

for the small high square of glass that gave on the head of the stairs,

lighted at all.

They had made, too, quite extensive arrangements for the occasion

itself. We had been warned that we should not be allowed to leave the

premises until the examination was over, and as far as possible

separate spaces had been provided for each of the twenty-five

candidates--compartments of screens hired for the day from some

furnisher or shop-fitter, and open at the ends to the gaze of the

half-dozen perambulating guardians of the probity of examinations who

looked as if they too had been had in for the day on the same terms

as the screens. The contrast between the new fittings and the old

wallpapers and chandeliers struck me. And I remembered that even

now, when I had been debited my three shillings to be present, I did

not see the place in its normal daytime aspect at all.

The papers were to be distributed at eleven, and at a few minutes before

that hour we were all assembled. A man called Mackie and myself were the

only two candidates for the Honours paper, and he and I were kept well

apart--I told off to a seat in the middle of the lecture-room, he

isolated in the typewriting-room. Evie, timorous about her Elementary,

was separated from Archie Merridew (who occupied the box between Miss

Windus and a pale student, Richardson) by the whole length of the

general room. We took our places; in all the rooms at once voices were

heard reading some cautionary form or other (my policeman gave me the

most mistrustful of glances as he pronounced the words "expelled from

the examination-room and your paper cancelled"); the papers were

distributed on the stroke of eleven, and the examination began.

I need not trouble you with what it was all about. The importance of

that day to me was quite unconnected with the paper on Method. I ought,

however, to say that the paper was in reality two papers, the first in

Theory and the second in Practice, with the interval for lunch dividing

the two. I mention this only to explain how it was we came to be all

talking together when, a little after half-past one, our first papers

had been collected and we were free to unsnap our satchels or untie our

parcels of lunch.

Despite my reduced income that week I had provided myself with a

sumptuous lunch--two kinds of sausage from a _delicatessen_ shop in

Shaftesbury Avenue, a paper of potato salad, a roll, butter, some sort

of chocolate _baba_ or _moka_, and a bottle of Schweppes' dry ginger

ale. That lunch had cost me nearly three shillings--but I intended to

eat only a third of it. The rest was to be my chief sustenance during

the two following days. I was not among my porters and drivers now--oh

no! I was cutting quite a dash. Archie, passing with Miss Windus as I

opened my black satchel, did not forbear to remark, "By Jove! doesn't

Jeffries do himself well, what?" and it had been in order that I might

be assumed to "do" myself equally well every day of my life that I had

made my little display. I ate my exact third in the same compartment I

had written my examination paper in, and then, closing my bag on the

precious remainder, put it under the seat and mingled with the others.

By a sort of natural selection, I presently found myself in the middle

bow window, discussing the questions he had just answered with my only

fellow-candidate in Honours, Mackie. Mackie, both at the college and

elsewhere, was one of these blatantly popular chaps, and I myself

didn't like him. In some respects he was rather of Archie's kind, but he

was older, more knowing, and had gone further. He was a singer of comic

songs at "smokers," and a frequent looker-in at the shilling dances at

the Holburn Town Hall after class. He was jubilant over the ease of the

Theory paper, and was already so confident of his pass that he was

cracking jokes right and left, as if a weight had been taken off his

mind.

"It's going to be like money from home if it's no harder than that!" he

exulted (almost prophetically, if what I said about the standard of

modern examinations is true). "Kitty Windus says she'll eat her

mackintosh, with the accent on the 'tosh,' if she isn't all right for

the Advanced, and the Elementaries are as safe as your hand in your

pocket! What ho! Come out on the stairs and have a Flor de Cabbagos."

I didn't want the Flor de Cabbagos, but I went out on the top landing

with him. One or two others were smoking on the floor below, which was

as far as we were allowed to stray. A few steps down Miss Windus and

Miss Causton were sitting on the stairs, as if they were sitting out a

dance, and Miss Causton moved lower down still as the fragrance of

Mackie's "Flor" reached her, and then a little way back again as she

caught the whiff that came up the well. Mackie was talking of the paper

again.

"All that mugging for a job you could do on your head!" he said, with

regret for the time he had lost. "I wouldn't have dropped out of the

billiard handicap if I'd known! Play billiards, Jeffries? I'm a regular

John Roberts--in my dreams. Give you fifty in a hundred at the Napier

when teacher says we can go."

And he ran on, with dull facetiousness.

But suddenly he stopped his rapid flow. He made a slight movement with

his finger, and stood listening. I heard nothing except the voices lower

down the stairs and the general hum in the room we had just left. But

Mackie did.

"Hear that?" he said.

"What?" I asked.

"Sssh!..."

I told you how the wooden partition at the head of the stairs, that with

the small window high up, separated the landing on which we stood from

the old ledger-room. The window was worked with cords on a horizontal

pivot, and was swung partly open. Whether Mackie heard whatever he did

hear through this window or through the boards themselves I do not know,

but a smile came over his face.

"It's that young devil," he whispered.

"Who?"

"Why, young Merridew. He's in there with somebody...."

I invite you to notice that I was improving. I was not eavesdropping

this time--I was merely letting Mackie do my eavesdropping for me. He

glanced round to see whether the women below were watching, and then set

his ear against the partition.

"Yes, it's Merridew," he chuckled. "Nice father's hope and mother's joy

_that_ young man's getting! I don't suppose he's gone in there to talk

to the secretary bird!..."

I found myself suddenly reminded of what I had noticed for the first

time only an hour or two before--that the room beyond the partition was

practically unlighted.

Then Mackie dropped again into the "bright" style affected by the

singers of comic songs at smoking concerts.

"Ahem--good-hevening, ladies and gen'lmen! How am I? Very well, thank

me! Ahem! I will now, with your kind permission, endeavour to entertain

you with a few of my well-known impersonations on a subject that will

appeal to all of you, no matter what your age, sex, condition,

vaccination marks or the number of your dog licence--_London's Lovers_."

"Oh, Mr Mackie's going to recite for us!" I heard Miss Windus' cry of

juvenile delight from down the stairs. "Please be quick, Mr Mackie--we

shall have to go in in ten minutes!"

And those below pressed up the stairs to hear Mackie.

But I did not stay to hear the "impersonation." I walked back into the

general room, and, with a violently throbbing heart, sought the seat

where I had written my examination paper.

Do you realise what I had just seen? Do you see what had set my heart so

thumping? If Mackie was right, and he had really got the cue for his

"impersonation" from something that was going on in the ledger-room,

young Merridew and Evie were alone in there together.

All that I had hitherto known of apprehension and despair and jealousy

of Archie's luck and chances and juniority was eclipsed by the emotion

that now flowed over me like a wave. The revelation swept me entirely

off my balance. It seemed to me that once more I awoke as if out of a

dream. I seemed to be standing as it were a little way off from my own

baseless hopes and illusions of the past weeks and coldly contemplating

my own egregiousness. I actually gave out loud a low laugh that harrowed

myself. What! To suppose that all, all I could do, would prevent youth

from coming together at the last!

So I made myself a spectacle of ridicule for myself.

Then, as the minutes passed, that which at first had seemed a pure and

perfect whole of hopelessness changed subtly and began to separate into

parts. And that brought such a change in me that I trembled to recognise

it. The shock of those first moments had stunned me, but I was now

coming out of my stupor. My first swift conclusion had been wrong. These

were _not_ young lovers whom mountains could not sunder. She, my

sleeping beauty, who had but now opened her eyes, no doubt thought I was

that; her soul was over-brimming; and I remembered her look of wonder

and reproach when, after she had congratulated me on that love-rise that

is the most wondrous of earthly dawnings I had given a puzzled "on

what?" When hearts can no longer contain that with which they ache to

bursting, lucky is the one who stands nearest to hand. His it is to

have, for the lifting of his finger, what else would spill. He may not

be athirst for the draught; a muddier liquor might quench his fire as

well; but this dew and ichor is his, though another parch for it.

For I needed no pointers from Mackie to know young Archie now. This was

his ignored and heaven-high luck, and he did not even want it. If their

being together in that unlighted room--their being together even as I

sat with my head between my hands staring blankly at the yellow deal

screen--if this meant anything at all it meant one thing and one thing

only, that she must give because it was her nature to give, and the cub

was philandering with her.

At that thought my despair gave place to something else. It was eaten up

in the white flame of wrath that flashed like a brand in my brain.

"Oh!" I thought. "So _that's_ it, my Archie?..."

I need not tell you again how I always have made my angers serviceable

to me. Five minutes later--though my will was well-nigh deracinated in

the process--I was its master again. It still struggled like a beast in

my hold, nor did I know whence the help could come without which it

would presently have me in its power again, but I still retained my

throttling hold on it. One last wild struggle the beast made; this was

when beyond the end of my screen-enclosed compartment, I saw them issue,

with an interval of half-a-minute between their coming out of the

library doorway. He was pink and triumphant; at her I forbore to look. A

minute later Mackie passed and gave an infinitesimally small jerk of his

head and a wink; but by that time I was holding my savage beast down

again.

Then a bell rang; there was a buzz and movement the candidates were

making ready again. Once more attendants read the caution, and then the

second paper was distributed. Mechanically I turned over the

gelatine-copied leaves that had been handed to me.

But I pushed them away again. A man who is engaged as I still was--a

luckless hunter who has missed his shot and is struggling desperately

body to body with his intended prey--has little time for anything but

the business in hand. True, I did draw the paper to me again and tick

off the questions that would be productive of the highest marks, but it

was long before I got any further. There would come between me and my

page Archie Merridew's pink and boastful face as I had seen him issue

from the library door.

I do not know how long I sat thus.

Draggingly at last I settled to work. But it was well-nigh hopeless. I

came to myself after a long interval to find that I was staring blankly

before me and muttering softly to myself. I had not written more than

half-a-page. Wearily I tried again.

The next external thing that I was fully awake to was that from the

typewriting-room there came the single "Ting" of the small clock on the

mantelpiece. I started. That single "Ting" always meant one of two

things--one o'clock or a half-hour. I had no watch.

I tried for a moment to persuade myself that the clock had just struck

half-past two.

Then I heard the attendant's voice: "You have one hour left."

"Good heavens!" I groaned.

I drew my paper to me again.

For a time I was not conscious of anything but the questions that must

be answered by half-past four. Indeed, so feverishly did I work that I

did not hear the attendants announce that we had only half-an-hour

longer. The next announcement I heard was that fifteen minutes only

remained.

Swiftly and flurriedly I turned over what I had written. I was just

half-way through the paper.

Wildly alarmed, I broke into rapid shorthand--the shorthand in which I

am writing this now. I did not know whether the shorthand would be

accepted; I only knew that in its larger aspect the object of the

examination was to determine whether I was master of my subject. I was

master of my subject. Those already diluted tests of capacity, the

questions, dictated their own replies: I put on top speed.

"You have five minutes more," sounded the relentless voice.

But I could have sworn that not one minute elapsed before, much louder

and more peremptory, came the final call:

"You must now cease writing!"

As I mingled with my fellow-candidates again I heard Mackie crying

joyously, "Oh, we got medals for this in Paris!" But I passed him by

without a glance. Nor had I any desire to linger about those premises my

first sight of which in the daytime had cost me three shillings in cash,

and a murderous rage that might indeed have closed the gates of heaven

in my face. I went quickly for my hat and coat, almost colliding with

Miss Causton as I turned a corner and muttering I know not what as she

shrank back and gave me a look that I could hardly reconcile with her

usually ironical and ruminating eyes. I merely wanted to get out of the

place....

But I did not escape so quickly but that I saw Archie and Evie following

me down the stairs. No doubt they were going together to her aunt's to

tea.

A week later I learned that I had passed with distinction in the Theory

part of the paper, but had failed in the Practice portion. The examiners

made a joke about "Paper Number Two," saying they had decided to hold it

over for next year's shorthand examination. Everybody knew whose paper

Number Two was....

Mackie had passed in both portions.