"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 sanct.i.ties 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 d.a.m.nable 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 bra.s.s knocker of Archie"s ivy-green door an hour before the cla.s.s 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 d.a.m.ned 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 h.e.l.lish 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate 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 gla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces 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 a.s.sembled. 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 p.r.o.nounced 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, b.u.t.ter, 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, pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.s. He was jubilant over the ease of the Theory paper, and was already so confident of his pa.s.s 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.