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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.ser-by might have concluded that I had an a.s.signation 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sed 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 bra.s.s 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d! 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 b.u.t.tonhole.
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 G.o.ddess. 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 superst.i.tion 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. Superst.i.tion 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, ma.s.sing, 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 a.s.sa.s.sins, 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 sn.i.g.g.e.r 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 circ.u.mstance 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 n.o.body 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 bra.s.s rail at his desk-head without seeing, across the s.p.a.ces 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.s and my steady reason would rea.s.sert 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 cla.s.s from hers.
Then would come the other d.a.m.nable 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 sanct.i.ty 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 h.e.l.l. 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.