"Well, perhaps it"s better than having one in the morning," said Ivy, more icily still. "All the same, there is such a thing as playing the game when you go out with people."
"I"m sorry. I oughtn"t to have come," said Louie, walking with the angry girl to the telephone exchange, where the lights on the great switchboard came and went like the sparks at the back of a gate. They were coming and going with great rapidity that morning.
"Oh, _much_ obliged for your company, I"m sure," Ivy broke out, "but----"
"Sssh!" came from a girl who stretched the rubber worms.
"Sssh yourself, Daisy Dawson--time you knew how to speak into a phone by this time!" snapped Ivy.
But another and a louder "Sssh!" came from another girl, and suddenly Mr. Stonor"s head appeared in the doorway.
"Quiet there!" he rapped out, and withdrew his head again.
"Sssh, Ivy--haven"t you heard?" Daisy Dawson said softly.
Ivy"s own voice dropped. "What?" she asked quickly.
"About Mr. Jeffries."
"No--what?"
Mr. Stonor came in again--but not before Louie had heard Daisy whisper the word "dead."
Suddenly she remembered the face of the liftman. She clutched Mr.
Stonor"s arm. He looked at her. There was no need to ask.
Dead!
Slowly she walked to her own table behind the screen.
The place was at once busier and more hushed than usual. Presently Mr.
Whitlock pa.s.sed. Mr. Whitlock was thirty-five; he looked fifty. Louie only asked him a single question: "Is it in the papers?" He nodded and pa.s.sed on. She sought a messenger.
It was on the right-hand middle page. It had happened at one o"clock in the morning; cerebral haemorrhage. That very evening he had given a dinner-party; followed a short interview with Sir Peregrine Campbell, one of the guests; but Mr. Robson, of the Board of Trade, had declined to be seen. There would be no inquest. Heartfelt sympathy was extended to his widow. Half-a-column of "career" closed the announcement. The early edition of the evening paper for which she sent out had it all over again.
Dead!
Another absence!
Slowly she turned the paper and began at the beginning again.
Jim dead!
That night Louie fetched Jimmy from his cot into her own bed. It was not, she felt, for comfort for herself; she had a strange feeling that she ought to be comforting Jimmy. Jimmy slept, but, her eyes alternately very widely open and very tightly closed in the dark, she whispered to him.
"Well, we"ve got to look after ourselves now," she whispered to the sleeping child. "I don"t think we care to go and see him, do we? I daresay she wouldn"t refuse it, but we won"t go. That was his wife, who said she"d a little boy like you, and of course we"re all very sorry for her. She did give him all she had; she said she"d die for him; but of course that"s only a way people have of speaking when they mean they love somebody very much. n.o.body wants her to die for him really; that would only be two dead instead of one; and she won"t actually die.... And she"d a sad thing happen once before. n.o.body ever knew about that really except me and him; she didn"t know; if she did she might die really then. People have to be careful, they say, when they"ve once had a terrible shock. It"s rather funny though, Jimmy, that mother shouldn"t feel very much of a shock. Of course I didn"t expect it, but as soon as it happened it seemed as if it had been bound to happen. That"s queer--and I don"t know that I wouldn"t have preferred the shock."
She continued her curious consolation of the sleeping boy:
"Poor Jimmy--poor mother! He looked beaten yesterday--done--but I didn"t think.... One never does think till afterwards.... Ah, but mother did, once, a long time ago! Mother danced with him once, and knew then--and the next time she saw him Jimmy was quite a big boy. If she could only have seen him a few times in between, she doesn"t know what she could have done, but she would have done something, and then by-and-by he would have blessed her for it--she"s sure, quite sure he would.... And there she was, with some terrible people at a music hall----"
She choked a little.
Even had it been proposed to her, she did not think she would have gone to see Jim. That was another woman"s affair; Louie"s part in him had nothing to do with what remained now. Not that she was so absurd as to tell herself she had lost nothing; even when it is only yours to look at, or perhaps to put your arms about just once, a body counts for something; but the other woman had had nothing but that. "Nothing but" was perhaps a queer way of putting it; for that "nothing but"
Louie might perhaps have given all the rest; but all the same it was not very much her business now. Her business now, like the other woman"s, was to jog on just the same, the one in her empty mansion, the other one it didn"t much matter where. Again she whispered to Jimmy.
"How thankful I am that I didn"t tell her--something! Oh, I don"t think I could bear her to die for him as she said she would! And I do hope he"s not been so foolish as to--leave anything about; anything that might tell her, I mean; she can"t bear what I can bear. But he wouldn"t. He wouldn"t cover it all up so cleverly to go and uncover it himself. I always knew it would happen if that insect got in his way; Jim wouldn"t think twice about it, except how to make himself safe....
Was it Kitty Windus who told me that about him--about his father having been an English merchant captain and his mother a Corsican woman he found dancing in a sailors" cafe in Ma.r.s.eilles? If it wasn"t Kitty I dreamed it; mother"s done a most foolish lot of dreaming; but it must have been Kitty. They say they do that kind of thing in Corsica. I shall never know.... Well, it doesn"t matter.... Poor little Jimmy...."
She deliberately tried herself, to see whether she was capable of emotion about him. She seemed to be quite incapable. "I"m simply callous," she thought.... She tried several days later, on the day of his funeral; the words she repeated to herself had no meaning for her; "gone," was merely a thing of four letters, "never" one of five. The word "absence" she quite failed to understand. She heard that Mrs.
Jeffries was prostrated, but quite as well as could be expected in the circ.u.mstances. Perhaps Mrs. Jeffries too was repeating the words "gone" and "never." Louie wondered whether she would marry again. It would not surprise her.
Well, if Evie Jeffries could live, Louie could live.
A piece of news, however, which she had from Billy Izzard one night--this was three weeks later, but her stony insensibility had not changed--filled her, she could not have told why, with a quite different disquietude. It appeared that Billy had felt himself permitted to call on Mrs. Jeffries, and had found her (so he told Louie) busy with her husband"s private papers. Sir Julius also had been there, to advise if advice was necessary; and Sir Julius had been of opinion that the painful task would be more quickly over if Mrs.
Jeffries would have a number of papers that were written in shorthand transcribed by a clerk, if a trustworthy one could be found. "In fact, he mentioned your name," said Billy. But it appeared that Mrs.
Jeffries knew some shorthand, had other reasons, and so forth. She had refused to have the papers transcribed. Naturally they had not said much with Billy there, who, indeed, had not stayed many minutes; but he had gathered that the papers formed some sort of a journal.
Louie felt her flesh grow queerly crisp. This, by the way, was in a little restaurant not far from the Palace Theatre. Louie had had three consecutive nights at home, and felt that a fourth would kill her. She and Billy were going to the Palace afterwards.
"A journal?" she said slowly.
"Well, Pepper rather thought a novel of some sort; I"d a talk with him afterwards; but I suppose he only knows what Mrs. Jeffries tells him.
It wouldn"t surprise me in the least that poor old Jeff dabbled a bit in that sort of thing. I"m quite sure he"d have made a painter. One of the big sort he was, the t.i.tian, Leonardo, Cellini sort--the big men, who can take an art or so in their stride."
"What made Sir Julius think it might be a novel?" Louie hoped that her new agitation did not show.
"My dear girl, you know as much about it as I do."
"And it was in shorthand?" she demanded.
"Yes."
"His own?"
"I"m sure I can"t say. It was in his desk though. Why?"
"And you say Mrs. Jeffries is reading it herself?"
"Well, when Pepper suggested you--and a Miss Levey, I remember, whoever she is----"
"Miriam Levey? Yes?" Louie said, with a jerk.
Billy looked hard at her. "What"s the matter?" he said abruptly.
"You"re as queer as Mrs. Jeffries herself was about it."