"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_ advertis.e.m.e.nt. We crossed and entered it.
"Rum--hot!" he called familiarly, peering under the frame of pivoted gla.s.s 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 ma.s.s of inexperience and self-sufficiency. Once again my hate was really a hatred of the whole dreary circ.u.mstances 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 cla.s.s, 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 s.e.x 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 a.s.sistance, 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 gla.s.s-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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed. 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 embarra.s.sment.
"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."