"Then," I said, "I shall have to tell you."
"So," I concluded some minutes later, "do you think you are--doing right--to marry?"
We still stood, he with his back to the name-board, I with my hand against it, almost enveloping him with my physical presence. And now, no detail of my arraignment spared, I had at last caught his eye. Even before he spoke my heart gave a savage leap. Already his soft and spongy nature had begun to be hardened to that att.i.tude I needed.
"Oh!" he said.... Then, proudly, "But this is interference."
"You think," I repeated slowly, "that you have the right to get married?"
His very admission was a defiance of me. "I know I"ve been rather a rotter," he bl.u.s.tered.
Once more I repeated monotonously:
"You still think, after what I"ve just said, that you have the right----"
"I think," he broke out, "that if you looked after your own girl and left me to look after mine it would be better. I"m frightfully sorry about the other thing, of course, but--dash it all!----"
Our long exchange of looks said the rest, and it was not my fault if he didn"t understand what his refusal to heed me would involve. Some people never understand, and cry afterwards, "You never told me that!" as if one man had the right to demand of another that he should speak the uttermost word. I cannot see that there is any such right. For such as these there is no uttermost word. Elias and the Prophets cannot make them understand. Though one rose from the dead to tell them they would not believe. The G.o.d who made them as they are cannot make Himself known to them--He can only destroy them again. They go out into the night in their ignorance, and for them there is no resurrection in knowledge....
Therefore if the uttermost word will not enlighten them, why speak it?
Weakness lies in that word. Because it is weak. Art leaves it unspoken, and the Seer, having spoken it, comes down from Sinai no more. Only by a withholding from it does man achieve. Making three parts greater than the whole, he does not put forth to the last. He will not return bankrupt to heaven. The unuttered utterance is his credential, to be restored to the Bestower of it.
Therefore I did not, at that time, tell Archie Merridew that if he married I should slay him. But all, all else was in my eyes for his taking.
Then our gaze severed.
As I dropped my hand from the wall the devil frisked in me again. I had warned him, and had my own safety to consider now. Without attention to detail you can accomplish nothing in this world, and a thing is bunglingly done when you yourself suffer the consequences of it.
Whatever I might do, I intended to suffer no consequences.
"Well, Archie," I said, as a man speaks who washes his hands of something, "I"ve told you what I think about it. There"s no doubt it is, as you say, an interference, but I think it"s justified, and so I"ll say no more.... And now, about that other: I need hardly say that I expect you to make things all right for me again."
"I will--I really will, Jeff," he promised at once.
"You see," I amplified, while the devil in me frisked, "leaving my reputation out of the question, it"s beastly inconvenient. For instance, I"m badly in need of some shorthand practice, and I certainly don"t intend to go up these stairs again until I"m rehabilitated."
He leaped at the chance of a reparation that would cost him little. "Oh, that"s easy," he said. "Of course your own place--I mean, why not use mine, as you used to?"
"Oh," I objected, "I can"t very well use your place when you"re not there."
"I"m going to be there most of the time now," he replied. "Perhaps you think I"m off on the skite again, but I"m not." ("The Devil was sick,"
thought I again.) "I"m dead off all that now--straight. I do wish you"d come!"
"But," I said (while that imp in me positively capered), "you"ll be awfully busy--with other things. I hear you"re to be married at once----"
"Not too busy for that, old man," he a.s.sured me. "Do come!"
"Well, I"ll see," I promised.
Half-an-hour later I was sitting in the British Museum reading-room with a stock of books on Medical Jurisprudence before me. Those two spirits within me were whispering again--plotting, machinating, discussing common ground of action. I had not yet resolved to take any action; but I had resolved, and firmly, that if action was to be taken I myself was not going to be caught unawares.
V
It was true that Archie was busy. His "skite" had cost him a good deal of money, and he intended to make good some of the loss by economising on his marriage. With this end in view he had determined that his honeymoon and his summer holiday should be run into one, and had fixed, or Evie had fixed for him, a day towards the end of August for his wedding. He was going to Jersey, for the sake of the breath of the sea (I fancy that in this he was following Store Street advice); and he intended on his return to go into rooms until he should have had time to look round for a house.
His personal preparations were extensive. Ten porters and carmen a day called at the house near the Foundling Hospital, delivering purchases, and his upper floor was heaped up with bags, boxes, drawers taken from their cases and laid upon the floor, brown paper, cardboard boxes, new clothing. And one day--I won"t set down the date--he lost his latchkey in the muddle. He did not know that he lost it as a result of my own close studies in the reading-room of the British Museum.
"Can"t find the blessed thing anywhere!" he grumbled. "I took it off the bunch to slip into the pocket of my evening waistcoat--you can"t carry a bunch of keys about in your evening clothes--and I can"t think where the devil I put it!... Well, I shall have to ask Jane for another."
It was also a consequence of my deeply private studies that about the same time I had an accident with the hook of his bedroom door. The night being sultry, I had removed my coat, and hung it on his hook, over one of his, and, somehow, in going through the pockets of the undermost coat in search of the key, he had several times twisted the collar-tab by which my own garment hung. In taking my coat down again a little later I used some force; I used so much force that I fetched the whole hook down, leaving a small piece out of the wood of the door, and, Archie, busy emptying a drawer, remarked that to put it up again would be something for the next tenant to do.
"Oh no--better leave the place as you found it," I said. "You go on--I"ll attend to it."
"Well, I don"t know where you"re going to find the screw-drivers--with my latchkey, I suppose," he remarked.
But I knew where the screw-driver was. I found it, and put the hook up securely again, a couple of inches below its old place.
I also carried constantly in my pocket, ready for use at any moment, a written page of notepaper, the compilation of which had cost me a good deal of thought in the reading-room.
Yet I must make perfectly clear to you that these and twenty other things that had the appearance of preparations committed me to nothing.
They were merely part of the prudent course of making ready, not for the best that might happen, but for the worst; and that the worst might be avoided I plotted at the same time with almost extravagant care. For all this last, however, the effective human mind works as it were in separate compartments of the job to be done, and there was no denying that this was or might become a job. I treated it as a job. And as a job it cost me no more qualms and tremors than the cool preparation for an examination in Method might have done. I did not turn pale when I read in a book of forensic medicine that when one man slays another he commonly uses far too much violence; I merely noted the fact, and reminded myself of it from time to time, to be perfect in my (I still hoped superfluous) lesson. I did not blench when I learned that, judicial executions apart, ninety-nine per cent. of hangings were suicidal, so that, certain other precautions being observed, a presumption could be made preponderatingly probable. I merely turned my attention to the qualifying precautions. And as for that sheet of paper I carried--well, young men have killed themselves for less reason, and seldom for greater. Indeed, to die by his own hand might be the final virtuous act in which he took his farewell of the world. I would--still in the last event, you understand--allow him that empty semblance of virtue. Whether he needed it in heaven or not, I needed it on earth.
And (I am still talking purely hypothetically) I now recognise that I had prepared our respective mental att.i.tudes with instinctive skill.
That clever fiend within me had seen to that before I had become awake to that fiend"s existence. By about the--till say a fortnight before the day fixed for his wedding--none could have told that I had the shadow of a grudge against him. He had made, for his slander of myself, a sort of semi-public apology--that is to say, he had mumbled a few words in the presence of Weston and the Princ.i.p.al of the College; but by that time the question of slander had been already so far from me that I had hardly had to affect an equanimity of manner. Without any effort whatever I had hit the necessary degree of magnanimity to a nicety, and there had been an end of that. I was free to return to the college again. This now mattered little since we were within a few days of the end of the summer term, and it was proposed to have, not a breaking-up party on the premises, but a boating-picnic at Richmond.
That I was in love with Evie Soames none knew. Did they? Could they? She was engaged to Archie, I to Kitty Windus; but I examined it again, to make sure.... No, no suspicion of jealousy could attach to me; none would think of a _crime pa.s.sionel_.... And was it jealousy? Was it a _crime pa.s.sionel_? I do not think you can say it was. True, I intended in the teeth of all the world to marry Evie Soames, just as I intended one day to be rich and to make my inherent power felt; but there would have been other ways than murder of accomplishing that. I should have found a way.... No; he had the best reason in the world for what I was so carefully planning for him. To me none whatever could be attributed.
My preparations (for the worst, of course) would be complete when I had made use of that paper I carried in my pocket.
It was one evening less than a week before the day of his wedding that I chose for the completion of these preparations, and I had walked with him as far as his home. There, with a good-night, I was artfully pa.s.sing on when he himself detained me.
"Aren"t you coming up for a bit?" he said. He had been monstrously hospitable since I had taken him to task about the slander. I had reckoned on this.
"No," I replied, "I must get some shorthand practice--I"m off home."
"Oh, come in," he urged, taking my arm. "I sha"n"t get much either this few weeks--come in, and we"ll have an hour together at speed. Come on--I"ve got some books you may as well have--I sha"n"t want two sets."
He meant he wouldn"t want Evie"s text-books as well as his own. I had not been able to afford books for my studies, and so had had to make use of those belonging to the college. This was the nearest he had come since my accusation to speaking about Evie and himself together.
I went up to his rooms for a speed practice in Pitman"s Shorthand.
"Here are the books," he said, when he got in. "Better put "em where you"ll have your hand on "em--once you lose sight of a thing in this mess you can say good-bye to it. That blessed latchkey of mine hasn"t turned up yet. Well, shall we get work over first and then talk a bit?"
He swept aside with his arm a heap of new shirts and collars and tissue-paper, took a writing-pad from the drawer of his table, and then looked round for something from which to read aloud. I produced from my pocket a newspaper, which I tossed over to him. I also had cleared a portion of the table for myself and was sharpening a pencil. My pad lay before me. He was taking his watch from the guard.
"Do I read first?" he asked, opening the newspaper. "Right-oh. Say when you"re ready."