That day Jimmy did not go back to his lodgings. Instead, he sent a wire
to Mrs. Benn, and went to dine and spend the night with the Kellys,
although he did not get away from the club until he had been introduced
to a score of journalists to whom his host described him as an old
colleague. As a result they were an hour late for dinner when they
reached the flat.
"It doesn't matter; my wife won't mind," Kelly remarked cheerfully as
they went up in the lift, and, a few moments later, when he met Mrs.
Kelly Jimmy saw that her husband was speaking the truth.
Dora Kelly was a pretty, thrifty little woman, with a mass of rather
untidy fair hair. She was still in the tea-gown which, apparently, she
had been wearing all the day, whilst her foot-gear consisted of a pair
of Japanese slippers; and yet the whole effect was charming, possibly
because she was entirely unaffected and obviously happy. The flat
reflected the character of its mistress. It was full of good things, all
in wonderful disarray. Even the drawing-room had an air of having
undergone a strenuous straightening up a month previously, since which
event it had not been touched again.
"Dinner won't be long, Douglas," Mrs. Kelly said. "But the cook went out
at four o'clock and hasn't come in yet; I'm afraid she must have got
drunk again; so I borrowed the Harmers' servant," she turned to Jimmy.
"Servants are such a nuisance, Mr. Grierson, yet one daren't discharge
them, and our cook is a treasure when she's sober. Douglas says you live
in lodgings in some suburb, so you don't have those worries, I suppose.
Here it's dreadful." She shook her head dolefully; but a moment later
she was smiling again and chattering gaily about her own experiences in
lodgings. She had been on the Press herself prior to her marriage, and
she knew, only too well, the ways of the London landlady.
If he had not chanced to saunter up Oxford Street that afternoon Jimmy
would have enjoyed immensely his dinner and the long talk which followed
it. He had been craving for the society of his own kind; yet now he had
got it it did not seem such a very great thing after all; for Lalage
Penrose had come into his life, and the thought of her was uppermost in
his mind. Even whilst he was talking over old times with Kelly, or
listening to Dora Kelly's laughing descriptions of the struggles of
their early married life, he was wondering how Lalage was spending the
evening, and the thought was making him sick at heart. Mentally, he
cursed himself for a fool, and tried hard to put the memory away from
him; but it was an effort all the time; and when Kelly finally allowed
him to go to bed, long after midnight, he shut his door with a sigh of
relief. But he did not undress. Instead, he sat in a big armchair,
staring into the fire, which, having been lighted by the borrowed
servant just before she left, a full three hours previously, had now
died down to a red glow.
He was a fool, and he knew it. The stronger part of his nature, that
which came of the alien streak in his father, warned him of the danger
of thinking seriously of chance female acquaintances, told him that no
man of the world ever did so; whilst to the Grierson strain in him
anything in the way of an intrigue was an unpardonable offence against
the canons of respectability. Douglas Kelly, the Bohemian, and Walter
Grierson, the city man, would both have called him mad, agreeing on this
point, if on none other; for they would argue that only a madman could
feel that he had any regard for a strange girl, who, by her own showing,
was without the pale. Suddenly he resolved to have no more to do with
Lalage. He would destroy her address, avoid those parts of the town
where he might possibly see her, drop the acquaintance before it went
any further.
He got up suddenly, took the slip of paper Lalage had given him out of
his pocket, and stood staring at words on it. It was well-written, in
the hand of an educated girl; but there was a shakiness in it which
suddenly destroyed all his wise resolutions, making an irresistible
appeal to his chivalry. After all, he himself, if not actually an
outcast, was one of life's failures. He had touched bed-rock, more than
once, and he knew too much of the bitterness of life to judge either man
or woman harshly. It is only those who have never suffered who show no
mercy to others.
What was it that American girl had said to him in Iquique, when she
insisted on lending him one hundred dollars, the time he was absolutely
penniless and too weak from fever to refuse? "The best thanks you can
give me, Jimmy, will be to help another girl if you ever get the
chance." He had returned the money a couple of months later, and he had
neither seen nor heard of her again; but the memory of her words had
remained, and now he seized on them as an excuse for the course he
wanted to follow. And so the slip of paper went back into his
pocket-book, tucked in carefully, though he knew every word that was on
it; and he sat down again, and remained, thinking and wondering, until
the fire had ceased to show even a spark of red, and the chill of the
room sent him shivering to bed, to dream of Lalage.
Jimmy came out of his room at nine o'clock next morning to find Mrs.
Kelly sweeping the dining-room. "The cook has not come back yet," she
remarked cheerfully. "I do hope the police haven't taken her, for she is
really a treasure when she's sober. And I can't very well borrow the
Harmers' servant again. So breakfast will be late; but you said last
night you weren't in a hurry, and Douglas isn't either. Won't you have a
whisky and soda, Mr. Grierson, whilst you're waiting. The decanter is on
the sideboard, or it should be--oh, no, I remember, Douglas has got it
in the dressing-room. I'll fetch it."
Breakfast was finally over about eleven o'clock. "We're not usually so
late, though it's always a movable feast," Mrs. Kelly explained, and
then Douglas prepared to go down to the office.
"They can always call me on the telephone if they want me specially," he
remarked, "and showing my independence is part of my scheme. I don't
think you'll ever be able to bluff, Jimmy. It isn't in you. At the back
of your mind, really, you're staid and respectable, with a reverence for
those set in authority over you, even for those who'll set themselves
there. So you'll have to trust to the merit of your work alone, and it's
a slow job getting recognition that way. What do you say, Dora?"
Mrs. Kelly smiled, and then suddenly her face grew grave, almost sad.
"Yes, it is a slow job sometimes," she said, softly. "Only Mr.
Grierson's old enough not to go under whilst he's waiting, and, of
course, he has the knowledge. It's those raw boys from the provinces I
pity." She shook her head as if at some memory, then followed her
husband to the front door. "Come again, Mr. Grierson, won't you," she
said as she shook hands. "Of course, you'll see Douglas often at the
club, and if he gives me longer warning I'll make sure the cook doesn't
get out. Douglas, dear, you might ask them at the police station if
they've got her. I've got a kind of creepy feeling which tells me that
they have, and, you know, the magistrate said he wouldn't fine her next
time."
"You're lucky," Jimmy said abruptly, as they came down the steps of the
mansions into the street.
Kelly looked up with a grin. "Do you mean in having our cook?"
Jimmy disregarded the question, and went on, "Were you lonely when you
first came home, before you married? Did you have to go through it, or
had you people of your own?"
He did not put it clearly, but the other showed he understood when he
answered, "My people are all in the North, and they're Nonconformists
and teetotallers. I went up once, and the governor and I quarrelled. I
haven't seen them since. Dora's never seen them. We were married six
months after I came home, on nothing. I wouldn't have risked it, but she
insisted for my sake. I was at the old game, you know."
Jimmy nodded. He understood, remembering vividly certain wild drinking
bouts which, incidentally, had given him some practical experience in
newspaper work, for on more than one occasion he had taken Kelly's
place, and brought out the little sheet.
They walked on a little way in silence, then, "Women are a confounded
sight better than we are," Kelly jerked out. "They see so much further.
We reckon we are being unselfish when we're only cowards; but they're
ready to back their own opinion and run the risk; and when they win they
let us take the credit."
"Some of them do, the right sort. But there are others----" Jimmy was
thinking of the girls to whom Ethel Grimmer had introduced him, those
whose parents had trained them in a due appreciation of the value of men
of position.
Kelly stopped suddenly and looked at him anxiously. "James Grierson," he
said, "I shall put you in a book some day when you're developed. At
present you're about twenty-one years old in many respects. Probably
you'll marry stodgily, or else you'll go to the other extreme and make
an even bigger ass of yourself."
Jimmy flushed uncomfortably, remembering Lalage; then went hot at the
thought of his own folly. He had only spoken to the girl once.