Project Gutenberg's In Accordance with the Evidence, by Oliver Onions This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: In Accordance with the Evidence Author: Oliver Onions Release Date: November 4, 2011 [EBook #37919] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE *** Produced by Quentin Johnson, Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) Coverone IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE OLIVER ONIONS IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE BY OLIVER ONIONS Author of "The Exception," etc. GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK Publishers in America for Hodder & Stoughton Copyright, 1913 By George H. Doran Company TO WILLIAM ARTHUR LEWIS BETTANY CONTENTS PART I PAGE HOLBORN 11 PART II WOBURN PLACE 113 PART III THE GARRET 191 PART I HOLBORN IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE EVIDENCE I It seems strangely like old times to me to be making these jottings in Pitman's shorthand. I was surprised to find I remembered as much of it as I do, for I dropped it suddenly when Archie Merridew died, and Archie's clear, high- pitched voice was the last that ever dictated to me for speed, while I myself have not dictated since Archie took down his last message from my reading. That will be—say a dozen years or more ago next August. It may be a little more, or a little less. Nor, since I do not keep it as an anniversary, does the day of the month matter. Either in my rooms or his, we had a good deal of this sort of practise together about that time, young Archie and I— reading aloud, taking down and transcribing. I am wrong in speaking of my "rooms" though; I had only one, a third-floor bedroom near the very noisiest corner of King's Cross. It was just opposite one of these running electric advertisements that changed from green to red and from red to green three times every minute; you know them; there are plenty of them now, but they were new then. The street was narrow; this horrible thing was at a rounded corner not more than five and twenty yards away; and even when my lamp was lighted it still tinged my ceiling and the upper part of the wall above my bed, red and green, red and green—for I had only a little muslin, half-curtain and no blind, and if I wanted to read in bed I had either to turn my lamp out until I had undressed or else to undress in a corner by the window side of the room, because of being overlooked from across the way. I don't think there were any other lodgers in the house. It was a "pub," the "Coburg," but I could get on to the staircase without going through the bars on the ground floor, and always did so. The rather sour smell of these lower parts of my abode reached me up my three flights of stairs, but I had got used to that. It was the noise that was the worst (except, of course, that red and green fiend of an advertisement)—the noise that greeted me when I woke of a morning, awaited me when I came back from Rixon Tebb & Masters' at night, and often became maddening when, at half-past twelve, they clashed to the iron gates of the public-house and turned the topers out into the street, to fraternise or quarrel for half-an-hour or more beneath my window. But we worked more in Archie Merridew's rooms than in mine. "Rooms" is correct here. He had the whole top floor of a house near the Foundling Hospital, a pretty house with a fan-lighted ivy-green door, early Georgian, a brightly twinkling brass knocker and bellpulls, and a white-washed area inside the railings to make the basement lighter. His folks lived at Guildford; his father paid his rent for him, thirty-eight pounds a year; and his pleasant quarters under the roof had everything that mine hadn't—he could sit outside on the coped leads when the weather was hot, draw up cosily to a fireplace shaped something like a Queen Anne teapot when it was cold, and the ceiling, truncated along one side, didn't begin to turn red and green the moment the twilight came. It gives me a shiver to think how atrociously poor I was in those days. More and more of that too comes back with the half-forgotten shorthand. I don't mean that I've ever forgotten that I used to be poor; it's the depth and degradation I mean and that—this will seem odd to you presently, as it seems suddenly odd to me as I write it—that memory is still more horrible to me than anything else I have ever known. My having got rich since doesn't wipe it out. If I were to become as rich as Rockefeller I should never forget the rages of envy, black and deep and bitter, that used sometimes to take me when I thought of Archie Merridew's circumstances and my own. I have got riches as I have got everything else—everything—I ever wanted, by attention to detail. You'll probably agree with me by-and-by that by "attention to detail" I mean rather more than most men do when they give this advice to young men about to start in life. I remember they used to give us, as it were, the empty form and shell of this maxim at the Business College, the place in Holborn Archie and I attended; but you've got to have been down into the pit and come back again before you realise the terrible force there is in these truisms. And no less in doing things than undoing them afterwards (when that has been necessary) have I planned to the very last minutiæ. If I have never seemed a particularly busy man, that has been because I have always disliked being seen in the act of doing a thing. And where I have passed my trail is obliterated. Archie Merridew and I were only half contemporaries. He was younger than I by a good seven years—was, as a matter of fact, only twenty-three when he died. And in nearly everything else we were as sharply contrasted as we were in our fortunes. Indeed, we were much more so, for while I miserably coveted that thirty-eight pound upper floor of his near the Foundling Hospital, my faith in myself and my ambition would have helped me over that. Physically, we were as different as we could be. My almost gigantic size made me, in my cramped red and green lighted apartment, an enormously overgrown squirrel in the smallest of cages; but to Archie's rather dandified little dapperness his series of roof chambers was spacious as a palace. Mentally we diverged even more. I was taciturn, he lively as one of the crickets that used to chirp behind his little Queen Anne teapot of a fireplace. And as for luck—well, if luck ever so much as nodded to me in those days, it seemed to change its mind and to pass by on the other side, while he seemed to pull things off the more easily the more recklessly he blundered. And he had his people at Guildford, while I had never a soul in the world. I don't know how we contrived to hit it off as well as, on the whole, we did. Perhaps that too was part of his lucky disposition—he could get along even with me. He always spread some sort of a weak charm about him, and this charm always disarmed me even, when to all intents and purposes he was merely rubbing in my horrible poverty. He would tell me, as if I wasn't already eating my heart out about it, that it was about time I made an effort—that he wasn't going to remain in those stuffy diggings of his all his days—and that if he had only half my brains he'd be up somewhere pretty high in a very short time (as he probably would had he lived)—all this, you understand, for my good, the cigarette gummed to his prettily shaped upper lip wagging as he talked, and with the best intentions in the world. He was quite devoted to me; would tell me how he had told other people about those extraordinary brains of mine; and he never dreamed (though it was not long before I began to) that our respective ages were even then making of our companionship a hopeless thing. A lad of seventeen may attach himself for a time to a man whose years number twenty- four of bitterness and exclusion, but they will part company again before the one is twenty-three and the other thirty. I was only an evening student at the Business College, while Archie spent his days there. Often enough he did not turn up in the evening at all; indeed, he only began to do so with unfailing regularity some time after Evie Soames had put her name down for the social evening course of lectures on Business Method. Evie Soames was a day student too, though only on three days in the week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; and the lectures on Method were given in the evening because they were specially addressed to those who, like myself, were employed during the day, and deemed to be ripe for the more advanced instruction. I don't think Archie was very much wiser for Weston's (our lecturer) efforts, but he was genuinely grateful to me for my explanations of them afterwards, and would pat me on the shoulder affectionately, and tell me he couldn't understand why everybody else didn't see what a rare good sort I was. That was his backhanded idea of a compliment. I think, in those early days of mine, I hated pretty well everything and everybody; and I cannot better show you how little I found to love than by giving you, before I go on with my tale, an account of my day at that period of my life—any day taken at random will do. I had to be at Rixon Tebb & Masters' by nine, why, I don't know, since nobody else of any account whatever turned up much before half-past ten. But eight of us had to be there by nine o'clock, and I will tell you how our eight had been got together. You know—or don't you know?—that there are firms that contract for the supply of "office labour" of all grades, from the messenger boy to the beginning of the confidential clerks; holusbolus, in the lump, as much of it or as little as you please. You pay, if you are an employer, a certain number of hundreds a year, and the agency does the rest. One down, t'other up; sack one man, and telephone for another. The agency's supply, at the maximum of a pound a week, is practically unlimited, and the firm escapes all personal responsibility in regard to its staff. I was one of these consignments of labour—or rather an eighth of one. I don't know now what I did. I know that I addressed envelopes and checked columns of figures and lists of names, quite devoid of meaning to me, and got eighteen shillings a week for it. There was no chance that I should ever get more than eighteen shillings. Ask for nineteen and the telephone rang, the agency was informed of your request, and ... well, three times I had seen that happen. One chance of escape, indeed, we had; the firm was clever enough to allow us that. It was by way of what I may call the permanent junior clerkship. The permanent junior clerk was, as it were, breveted with the rank of the real clerks in the inner office; and so was hope dangled over the heads of eight of us. There was the junior clerkship amongst the eight of us. That or nothing. I need hardly say that jealousy, espionage, and scheming besmirched our souls. Well (to continue my account of my day), I addressed envelopes or read aloud from interminable lists until one o'clock, and then I lunched. This we were not allowed to do in the office, so that usually I ate from a paper bag in one of the quieter streets, or else had a scone and milk at an A.B.C. shop round the corner in Cheapside. I was alone. My fellow- stuff from the agency, always on the lookout for a pretext of mistrust, found one in my (I admit) uncommon face. I put in the time until two, when I was not smothering up annoyance at those who would turn round to stare at a man who had been made half a head taller than the rest of the world, in wondering whether those about me were as rich or worse off than I, and whether they were able to procure a bath as cheaply and easily; and then I returned to Rixon Tebb & Masters' again. At six-thirty I proceeded home, washed, and went out to dinner. I dined at one of the establishments near the corner of Pentonville Road; you have seen them, there is an arrangement of gas-jets behind a steamy window, and, in galvanised iron trays, sausages and onions and saveloys fry. The proprietor of the "pull-up" fetched my dinner out of the window on the prongs of a toasting fork, and I ate it in a small matchboard compartment, or, when these cabinets particuliers happened to be all pre-occupied, at an oilcloth-covered table that ran down the middle of the shop. During and after my meal I read the whole of The Echo—I was allowed as a habitué to retain my seat longer than the casual diner. But on the nights on which I took a bath (did I say I sponged on Archie Merridew for this convenience, carrying my clean shirt in a paper that also served for the wrapping-up of the one I had removed?), I added to my obligation by supping with him also, and then we walked on to the Business College together. My clothes I bought in Lamb's Conduit Street, my boots in Red Lion Passage. I had always the greatest difficulty in getting a fit in either. At one time I had the misfortune to make myself very unpopular among the proprietors of a row of barrows not far from Southampton Row. This was over the purchase of a collar, and the cub under the naphtha lamp had made some joke or other about the uncommon size I required, saying that the horse collars were to be had in St Martin's Lane. The blow under the ear I gave him was heavier than I intended; I am afraid I broke his jaw, and I avoided the street for a long time. After the class, I either continued my studies, as I have said, with young Merridew, or else took a walk. In this again I was always alone. I went far afield. If I went west, I usually turned along Great Russell and Guildford Streets, but the moths, English and foreign, of the half light of this last thoroughfare caused me at one time to take the way of Holborn and Gray's Inn Road. The nickname they gave me, they also gave, I don't doubt, to fifty men besides myself, but it seemed somehow to attach itself more conspicuously to me because of my general conspicuousness. It was that of the mysterious and ubiquitous author of a series of unelucidated crimes as to the nature of which I need not be specific. Then, when I had walked my fill, I returned to my cage opposite the red and green electric advertisement. This is a fair sample of my days at that time. II There is a showy boot shop now where the Business College used to be; the new place is in Kingsway. There, in Kingsway, I am told they have methods and appliances undreamed of in my time—mechanical calculators, wonderful filing systems, elaborate duplicators, and lectures on Commercial and Political Economy and Mercantile Law—but the old Holborn curriculum included shorthand, typewriting, book-keeping, and lectures on method and not very much besides. When I left, I remember, they were just beginning, as a high novelty, advertisement-writing. Later, I myself took this class, though only for a few weeks. Even then, I think, the Holborn place was condemned to come down. A second-hand book shop occupied the ground floor; and above the book shop window three columns, each of three bow windows, one for each floor, formed the frontage. The three bow windows of the top floor were ours. Inside, the place was small and inconvenient in the extreme. It had been a dwelling-house once, and the old fixtures still remained—dark cauliflower wallpapers, heavy ornamental gas-brackets, and little porcelain fittings by the fireplaces that still rang, in the second of the two rooms that had been knocked into one to form a lecture-room, a row of bells that resembled a series of interrogation marks. Only four women attended the classes. The business woman was, comparatively speaking, a rarity then, nor can I quite make up my mind as to how much things have changed in this respect and how much they remain exactly as they were. They have certainly changed if it is all on account of her certificate that a young woman can now walk into an office and be promptly asked at what hour it will be convenient for her to begin her duties on the morrow; and, lacking certificates, three of our four students could hardly have fallen back on any natural diploma of personal charms. I mean, in a word, that Miss Windus, Miss Causton and Miss Levey were, to say the least, not remarkably pretty, though Miss Causton was beautiful as far as her figure and movements went. But Evie Soames was very different. She was, in actual years, twenty; but she seemed still to stand among the debris of her teens as an opening tree stands over its sprinkling of delicate fallen sheaths in the spring. Both graces and awkwardnesses of an earlier time still clung, as it were, to her stem. She had, as I later learned, been at one school until she was seventeen, at a second school until she was nineteen, and now, after a year of indetermination and arrested development at home, was still further delaying her maturity by beginning again not very differently from the way in which she had begun at fourteen. She had, of course, picked up a number of unimportant acquirements by the way, but had never, in those days when I first knew her, given it a thought that Evie Soames was a person Evie Soames might well have some natural curiosity about. She moved, neither woman nor schoolgirl, among the charts and files and dusty ledgers of the Business College, slender, dark, necked like a birch, and with eyes than which, when she looked suddenly round, the flash of a negro's teeth was not whiter. I have told you how my days were passed, but not yet said anything about my dreams. As I cannot speak of Evie Soames apart from these I will do so as briefly as I can. Whatever else in my life I may have been, I have not, even in my dreams, been a sensualist. It might in some respects have been better for me if I had. But so far was I from that that I have even been charged (though the charge is really as wide of the mark as it could well be) with a certain inhumanity; by which I mean, not cruelty, but—how shall I express it?—a certain inaccessibility to the ordinary human relation. And I do not believe the woman lives who, given her choice of these two interpretations of the word, would not prefer the former. Only in the latter does she foresee her final defeat. Therefore, when at midday in Cheapside, or in Guildford Street as I returned from my lonely rambles, or in Holborn or Oxford Street at the hour when shops and offices turned out their human contents, male and female, after the day's work, I watched the pattering feet on the pavements, I was not stirred as the fleshly stockbrocker or conscienceless "blood" is stirred. (You must allow me this generalisation; you know what I mean.) My eyes did not meet other eyes as seeking acquaintance. I never, in train or tram or 'bus, set off my vacation of my seat for a woman against the bow or thanks I might receive. I never, even at my loneliest, held a waitress or attendant in talk for any satisfaction I had in her nearness. Whatever I have learned from crowds, crowds have had nothing of mine. Nor, my heavy and immobile appearance notwithstanding, was I (I affirm this) a solitary because I was refused acquaintanceship. I was a solitary because I refused it. But what I refused in the streets by day, I could not sleep for seeking when I lay down at night. What I sought I did not and do not know; I was only conscious of a hunger within myself that, not being satisfiable by the eye-profferings and other partial prettinesses of the crowd, were never offered that sustenance. I have heard this hunger described as a Divine Discontent, but that is to beg a question of some magnitude. It might be a very different thing from that. It might just conceivably be an Infernal Discontent. Or it might, in the case of a man who regarded neither God nor devil—But I wander. This, I say, was my dream, and I shared it with no sensualist. Of course you have already guessed why I say all this ... guessed what happened. Between the commonnesses under the street lamps which I spurned, and those dreams that were ever unseizably beyond my most ardent reaching forth, I fell in love with Evie Soames. There are, I know, men in whom a grim and uncompromising aspect is so richly compensated for by other gifts that, like John Wilkes, they may fairly brag that with fifteen minutes' start they would out-distance in a woman's favours the most regular-featured buck in London. Therefore (if I may use a "therefore" without egregiousness) it troubled me little that Miss Windus, not to speak of her two companions, Miss Causton and Miss Levey, found me unattractive. In that coin I could have repaid her, had I wished, with interest. Since I did not wish, my attitude was one of fully-armed reserve. All three of these women seemed to me to be for ever proclaiming, if not in words, yet in everything but words, that men, as men, have worldly opportunities given them by a sort of favouritism, and as a kind of present for their circumspection in getting themselves born men—as if in this world either men or women ever got anything they were not quick enough or strong enough or callous enough to seize for themselves. Miss Windus in especial, a sharp-featured woman of twenty-eight, with apertures like little scalene triangles out of which her eyes peered with an expression quizzical and weak and yet perky and self-confident at the same time (as if she was saying perpetually to herself, "We may as well hear what this one has to say for himself!") struck me as being the final word in self-importance and inefficiency. The top-heavy little Jewess, Miss Levey, was a very broker for gossip and tattle, and the remarks she occasionally made about others to me were quite enough to warn me that she would make equally free with myself to others. Both she and Miss Windus seemed to shout aloud the very sex-difference the existence of which they seemed at the same time to be denying. They "could not think of giving trouble" when one or other of the forty men placed a chair or adjusted a light or carried a Remington for them; but they would have known how to show their sense of the absence of such attentions all the same. I do not know that Miss Causton pleased me very much more, but she at any rate moved with a wonderful physical harmonious grace and flow. If one might judge from her hands and wrists (a business certificate on which she ever bestowed the most sedulous care) she did not come from quite the same social level as the other two—was, perhaps, the daughter of a doctor who had married his house-keeper, or of a decent governess whose decency had not prevented her from running off with a groom; but I made no attempt to unravel either this riddle or any other that her rather contemptuous grey eyes might contain. The attitudes she took in reaching down a book from a shelf or passing her arm about the waist of one of the other girls when they assembled for gossip were all I wanted of her, and those began and remained a purely æsthetic satisfaction. Therefore there could hardly have been a more complete contrast than there was between these apparently a-sexual yet in reality excessively sex-conscious women and my delicate unawakened Evie Soames. She made no more difficulty about giving me a "Good-evening," or "Good-night" than she did with the rest of the world; and though for a long time our speech stopped at that, it was yet as much as I had with any other woman whomsoever. That I should get even thus much of what everybody else in the world seemed to get as a matter of course came so gently and softly over me that I did not dream of a worse misery that might lurk hidden within it, and in those early days of my love a mother would not have fought more wildly for her babe than I would have turned on any who had offered to come between me and even this sparse sweetness that had come for the first time into my life. III The events I am now about to relate occurred during those early days, while I was still content to possess my dreams, as if as long as I closed my eyes the world would stand still about me. One November night, as the series of lectures on Method was drawing to a close, I returned with Archie Merridew to his rooms, silent, but exceedingly happy. The cause of my happiness will not greatly excite you, it had been no more than Evie's "Good-night, Mr Jeffries," given me as I had waited on the stairs of the college for young Merridew, who had lingered behind to ask Weston something or other. I had heard them coming down from the landing above, and, looking up, had seen the trail of Miss Causton's long grey coat and Miss Windus's blue and green plaid skirt and her gloved hand on the shaky old rail. I ought to say that the western-most of the three pillars of bow windows I have mentioned as forming the Holborn frontage of the college was the one that lighted the various floors of the staircase, and if parties had ever been given in that old house before it had got quite so old, it is odds that the embrasure in which I had just then been standing, that of the first floor, had held a few palms in pots and a couple of figures on its low window-seat many a time. But that night it had only held myself, waiting in the shadow shaped like a coffin-shoulder that the globeless gas of the landing cast. I had heard Miss Windus's little smothered exclamation. "Oh!... That man!" but instantly she had gone on talking in a higher voice. Certainly she had had reasonable colour for the pretence that she had not seen me—had I not happened to hear her exclamation. And if I had heard it, so, of course, had Evie. "Good-night, Mr Jeffries," Evie had said as she had passed me, and Miss Windus also, as if suddenly discovering me, had given me quite a bright "Good-night!" Miss Causton also had given me a languid, almost insolent smile. I was happy. I should probably have taken myself and my happiness off somewhere had it not been that that evening I had made use of Archie's bath, and had left in his place, besides that paper parcel I have mentioned, a notebook of which I had need. So I had returned with Archie, and, not intending to stay, had yet sat down, overcoated as I was, before his fire. "Better take your coat off for a bit," Archie said. "I'd like a squint at your notes too, if you're not in a hurry." The notes were part of our preparation for the examination in Method which was to be held shortly before Christmas. I threw apart, but still did not remove my coat, and Archie took up my notebook and read as he stood. Presently, feeling for a chair with his foot, he sat down, still reading the notes. He looked up from time to time, but the questions he put barely interrupted my reverie. I stared at the fire in the pretty old-fashioned grate. He had no gas up there; his cardboard lamp-shade, green outside and a little heat-browned inside, stood on a chenille-clothed table; and he had given the shade a tilt for his convenience in reading. Thus the fireplace end of the room lay in a sort of irregular parabola of illumination. There were bright circles on the ceiling above the chimney of the lamp; then came spaces of cosy gloom; and below, in the pleasant light, were his arm-chairs, his small book- shelf, and, the rail of it catching the firelight, his high perforated brass fender. In the middle of a great cam of light that lay over the dimity-papered wall between his sitting and bed rooms, his dressing-gown, hanging from a hook in the bedroom door, made a grotesquely human-shaped shadow. By-and-by, with the book on his knee and his eyes still fixed on it, Archie began mechanically to unlace his boots. I looked up as he reached for his slippers, and then resumed my reverie. I was glad that Kitty Windus, whether she realised it or not, had been made the subject of an innocently awkward little snub. I couldn't stand the woman. I couldn't stand it that, ignoring my existence when she could, she spoke to me, when she did speak, with a false vivacity that only enhanced the effect of her passing over at other times. And lest you should think I was wasting my detestation on a rather insignificant object, I must ask you again to remember what my days were. The whole Scheme of Things seemed to be against me; but there is not much relief to be had from taking a blind fling at the Scheme of Things. A man with a grudge against the world will be very likely indeed to take that grudge out of the nearest person. I was not prosperous enough to have much time to waste on human charities. So, in my resentful hours, I took it mercilessly out of one against whom, in my calmer moments, I had no grudge except that she was not a thousand miles away. And if she had been a thousand miles away, I should have vented my bitterness on somebody else. I had to get rid of it somehow. But if my thoughts gave Miss Windus more of this than she fairly deserved, perhaps Evie Soames got more in another sort than she deserved either. There was not one of the few stray graces and sweetnesses I had ever known that did not accrete to and abide about the thought of her. No generous emotion, no human impulse I had ever experienced, but came with adoration and rich gifts with which to exalt her. In my heart I lighted tapers about her image. I did not ask myself whether she had supplanted my dreams, existed side by side with them, or was indeed my dreaming made truth. I did not wonder what she might have been in another man's dreaming, nor whether, apart from the dreaming of some man, she existed spiritually at all. I only knew that the fire inside Archie Merridew's fender was not warmer than that central warmth that seemed to steal (as if there also some bud-sheath had yielded) about my heart as I pictured again her sapling-straight figure, the flash of her turning eyes on the landing, and the tone in which she had bidden me good- night three quarters of an hour before. I leaned back as it were in some longed-for luxurious resting-place of the heart. I do not know the origin of the tears that gathered in my eyes. Suddenly Archie threw the book on to the table and stretched himself. He gave a yawn and put his feet on the fender. "Oh, I'm sick of work for to-day!" he said. "When are you going to start smoking?" he added as he drew out a cigarette-case. I answered something or other—it didn't matter what, since my lovely moment had gone with the breaking in of his voice. "Oh, well!..." he laughed, lighting up. Then, glancing at the blowing end before throwing his match into the fender, he said: "I say—what a jolly sort of girl that Miss Soames seems to be!" As the cold of a spring night freezes the newly mounting sap of a tree, so I felt some sweet and vigorous change suddenly arrested in my heart. "Wh-who?" I said. I had to make two attempts at it. He laughed. "Oh, of course—I forgot, girls don't interest you. Like your not smoking, I suppose. Hadn't noticed there were any girls at the college—only see text-books and Remingtons.... Well, not to spring it on you too suddenly, there are four girls there, three of 'em rather sticks, but the fourth a ripper. What a rum chap you are!" he concluded with another laugh. He had drawn his chair still closer to the fire, and now sat with his feet, not on the fender, but half-way up one of the pilasters that supported the chimneypiece. As he kicked off one slipper and began to warm one small foot on the iron- work just inside the pilaster, his profile was turned to me; but I didn't at first risk stealing a look at it for fear of meeting his eyes. Stealthily, however, and moving my head as little as possible, I did so. It was a pretty profile—fair curly hair thick on the crown, his head rather high at the back and of a long shape to the chin, good nose, pleasantly curved mouth —the head of a decent enough but quite unremarkable youngster of twenty-two. He was neatly dressed in a grey stripe, and wore a black-bound red waistcoat with brass buttons. I say he was decent enough, and so he was: I knew he knew the taste of whiskey, but don't think he drank it very often. "Good wholesome beer," he used to say with an air of experience, "was more his mark"; but even then I think the experience was more that of his companions than his own. You wouldn't have said there was much harm in him, and he would probably have to spend his allowance unwisely once or twice before he learned to spend it wisely. I made the moving of my chair an excuse for getting him better under observation. "Oh yes, awfully jolly," he repeated, blowing a plume of smoke through which the firelight shone rustily. "Fun ... no end of fun ... rather!..." Then he smiled, and the smile came and went and came again as he smoked. I don't know why, up to that moment, I had never thought of it—never thought of how it might already be or might presently become. I suppose the reason was that a man cannot hold the commerce I held with dreams without to some extent losing his touch of actuality. But now, at last, I was awake enough.... As if the room had turned colder I pulled my coat a little more closely about me. It was not then that that heart of mine, which I have likened to a bud suddenly arrested in the moment of its unfolding, became more likenable to a grenade with its fuse waiting exposed for the spark that should bring destruction.... But I was quite calm. For the matter of that, I am never anything else when it comes to the point. My angers have served their purpose when they have brought me to the point. I use anger.... Therefore, though I knew already that three careless words of his had opened an immeasurable abyss between us, I was able to speak to him without a tremor, from my chair at one side of his hearth to him in his own at the other. "You mean Miss——What's her name?" "Soames," he informed me. "You know—that young girl—you must have seen her.... Yes, full of fun.... I laughed.... I did laugh!" From the way in which he still laughed there must have been a specific occasion for his mirth. I knew of none such. I wished to know, however, and I also wished to know what he meant by "fun." Young men mean so many things by "fun," and it—But I stifled something within my breast almost before it was born there. When I spoke, my voice was as steady as it has ever been in my life; but the devil, watching a soul that hesitates on the point of sin, does not watch more closely than I watched that fair boy with the cigarette dangling from his upper lip. "Ah, yes, I've seen her.... Pretty, too," I hinted. But he put, if he heard, her prettiness aside. He chuckled again. "I went last Sunday to the Zoo, you know," he said. "They were spending the week-end in town—my folks. And I saw her there. Or rather, I didn't see her at first, it was Mumsie who saw her. 'I think there's somebody you know,' she says to me, and I looked, and there she was, bowing to me. Then up came pater—he'd dropped behind somewhere—and blest if he didn't know her aunt—she lives with her aunt—they have rooms in Woburn Place. So we all went round together.... I started the fun by saying how like old Weston the secretary bird was; so we went round looking for likenesses—raked up everybody we knew——" He stopped, suddenly. He wouldn't, had he been a year or two older, have pulled himself up quite so sharply. It is true he didn't go so far as to colour, stammer, or bite his lip; but his meaning, or his inadvertence, or whatever you like to call it, could hardly have been plainer had he done all these things. An anecdote was related to me not so very long ago by an agent I employ to advise me in my picture-buying. It was of the most sardonic of our caricaturists, and this merciless artist had (so the story ran) refused to caricature a certain person, giving as his reason that, while a vain or over-praised or too consciously handsome face was fair game for his ironic pencil, a face already heavily visited by nature went free. But for Archie Merridew's sudden embarrassed check I might have imagined that my own visage might have gone free also. It is, after all, not repellent. I bear quite a strong resemblance to at least one public man whose photographs appear in the illustrated papers—a distinguished scientist. My stature is the most striking thing about me, and if your humour takes that turn you can find remote suggestions of any number of people at the Zoo. I made, however, no sign, and he, judging his clumsiness to have passed unnoticed, went on: "Funny the pater knowing her aunt like that, wasn't it? Rather fun though. Mumsie said she must come down to Guildford for a few days and stay with us; if she does I shall go home that week-end—you bet!" My answer gave me no pain. It came, I think, out of just such an automatic reflex as causes an "opening" in conversation to call forth its own obvious reply. It would have been more marked not to say it than to say it, and as I am telling you, in my state of still tension it didn't hurt. "Oh!" I said. "And when does one congratulate you?" "What d'you mean?" he asked. "Why, on your engagement." Instantly I knew I had said the right thing. There was nothing either false or forced about the little exclamation he made, half scoff, half laugh. His face was clear as crystal. By "fun" he meant, simply, mere physiological laughter, the bubbling- up of the high spirits of his years. Human resemblances at the Zoo are quite enough to call up this purely functional giggling. She was "fun" (the odds were a thousand to one) as his sister might have been fun; with a certain freshness and sense of discovery perhaps, but otherwise not very differently. In spite of the sequel, I still think I am right in making this statement. "Don't be an idiot!" he said.... "I say, Jeff, I couldn't quite make out that about indexing and cross-references to-night. Did he mean that the cross-references are a sort of double entry for when the subjects overlap, or what?" But there was still something I wished to verify. "Who?" I asked. "The—secretary bird?" This time I think he did colour faintly, but as he had swung his legs down from the fireplace and was reaching for my notebook again I could not be quite sure. "Pass me the book," I said. For the next quarter of an hour I gave him as collected and lucid an explanation of his difficulties as if I had had no other care in the world. Then I lifted myself up. I buttoned my coat, put the notebook into my pocket, and briefly recapitulated what I had told him. "Thanks, awfully," he said gratefully, when I had finished. "You are a brick. You ought to give the lectures instead of old Weston. I'm sure if I pass this exam it will be all you. Must you go?" "Must." "Well—so long—I think I'll make a few notes myself before I forget again." And, still master of myself, I left him arranging papers and feeling in his inkstand for a pen. 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 passed 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 passer-by might have concluded that I had an assignation 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 circumstances 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 passed 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 brass 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 advertisement 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 God, 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 God! 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 buttonhole. 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 goddess. 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 superstition 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 t...