The Story Of Louie Part 20

"Then ring the bell, please--and don't light that cigar till I've gone. I shall be ill if you do."

And Lord Moone himself had ordered the carriage in which she had turned her back on Trant.

Burnett Minor, when Mrs. Lovenant-Smith had surprised the rebellion in the box-room, had not made herself more inconspicuous than had Captain Chaffinger during this scene. Indeed, probably considering that Lord Moone, his sister and Louie herself formed a quorum, he had presently been discovered to be not there. But it seemed to be the Captain's lot to receive and despatch Louie in her comings and goings, and before the carriage had reached the lodge he had stopped it and climbed in.

Ordinarily, the whites of the Captain's eyes had yellowish marblings; the yellow had now deepened to the hue of cayenne. He had blown his nose repeatedly and violently, and Louie, glancing covertly at him, had suddenly had a pang. All at once he had shown his age. Somehow Louie resented his doing so. People and things you have never taken quite seriously have no right to come near the tragic. It was as if some puppet strutting within a proscenium should suddenly bleed.

"Mops," he had said by-and-by, blowing his nose again, "that was a lie you told them, wasn't it?"

Louie had tried to shut her eyes to Chaff's bleeding. Her hand had sought his.

"The name I told them? Of course it was, you clever old Chaff, to see that."

"You don't tell me that, do you, Mops?"

"You?! No, poor old boy, it isn't worth while telling lies to you."

"I'm glad of that, Mops----"

So, for his private comfort, she had invented for Chaff quite a new lie, name, station in life and all.

Then: "Oh, Mops, Mops, Mops!----" he had murmured sorrowfully.

Little parties were one thing, but his Mops quite another.

But her anger had stirred again. She had remembered her uncle's proposals.

"Did you hear what he said--Moone? No; you'd gone out. Listen----"

He had tugged unhappily at his moustache as she had told him, bringing out the words with vehemence and hate.

"Well, but, Mops----" he had demurred wistfully.

"What, are you going to tell me _you_ think so too?"

"All right, Mops, all right, all right, old girl----"

"Much I care for him and his family name! He could bully mother into marrying people, but he can't bully me.... Sorry, Chaff, that was clumsy; we're pals at any rate. Uncle Gus and his Scarisbricks!"

Her exclamations of contempt had occupied the rest of the time to the station. Chaff had put her into her carriage.

"You'll let me know where you are and what you're doing, won't you, dear?" he had pleaded. "I can't let you go like this!"

"I hardly know where I shall be myself yet. Very likely I shall go to a Business School; I shall have to do something, and that's all I know anything about. Anyway, the bank will find me--no, you poor old thing, of course I don't mean the money! Of course I'll ask you for that when I want it. I've quite a lot yet. Good-bye, old thing."

"Good-bye, dear."

And this time he had not warned her not to run away with a student of book-keeping.

She went to the Business School partly (_bien entendu_) for amus.e.m.e.nt, and partly because there would be very little sense in sitting all day long in Mrs. Leggat's first-floor bed-sitter in Sutherland Place, Bayswater. Perhaps, too, Lord Moone helped to drive her there. Her very skin crept when she remembered the lengths to which he would have gone--he, the corner-stone of orthodoxy when such subjects came up for (very) full-dress debate--to save that precious thing, the family name of the Scarisbricks. Louie had had vanities of person, scores of them; but she had also the sense of the holiness of the body, and she had had enough of Trants and Mallard Boises and their masters for a time.

The Business School would be as amusing as anywhere else; indeed, she knew of nowhere else. Here she was at last in a London that was not the London of shops and dinners and theatres and drives in the Park.

She would have the fun--always the fun--of it. She would go with the Leggats to see Richenda's sisters and that father of hers who had apologised to her for having brought her into the world. She would learn these unfamiliar accents that met her ear, breathe this invigorating if dusty air. She would know what life meant to that skimpy woman in the green plaid, would inspect that new specimen, the jaunty boy who made his good clothes look like an ordinary "reach-me-down." And she knew, without knowing how she knew, that before long she would be seeing her father. Sit in Sutherland Place?

Oh no, that wasn't amusing. Besides, she would presently have her living to earn. She had thought, when Richenda had told her those dismal tales, that there must be something wrong with Richenda and that she herself would be able to do better. Well, she would very soon know.

II

At Chesson's she had taken her proper place among her fellow-students at once; it was not her fault if here, at the Business School, she did not at first so much make friends as watch a number of amusing phenomena. She watched them with wonder; all was so very, very different. The building itself seemed once to have been some sort of a dwelling-house, for there were cabbagey wall-papers of a bygone fashion on the walls, broken ends of bell-wire stuck out from the mantel-sides and the cornices, and the gas-brackets were old and ornate and grimy. Louie was conscious of something like a shock the first time she approached one of the third-floor bay windows and, looking across the street, saw in the windows opposite men packing things in brown paper, waitresses carrying trays, and gas-jets burning in the dark interiors beyond. They seemed so near. The width of Holborn lay between, but they seemed to crowd on her much more closely than the yew at Rainham Parva had ever crowded on the inner windows of the courtyard. The yew, moreover, was thinned at intervals, but there was no cutting and lopping the forward-thrusting, amusing humanity across the way. They seemed to be caged there expressly for her observation. Well, she was there to observe--to observe, and, of course, to be amused.

Her new companions, too, were unlike anybody she had ever known; they no more resembled them than the sweet heavy airs of Chesson's resembled these diverting smells of dust and damp and bad ventilation and the whiff of the Holborn pavement below. Their accents (amusing, however) struck her sharply; their faces--alert, sophisticated, highly entertaining but without candour--no less sharply. They too, like the buildings across the way, seemed to ignore intervening s.p.a.ce and to press intrusively forward to look at her. She was glad that the first thing she had done had been to stop Mr. Weston's mouth on the subject of the Scarisbricks and Lord Moone; half the drollery of her experience would have gone had these people known who she really was.

And the things these slovenly voices said had no candour. They struck her as a series of (merry) "scorings-off," a succession of (cheery) "chippings" of one another. If their reticences seemed all in the wrong places, and hand in hand with their defensiveness went an eager volubility about the things Louie would have kept to herself, why, so much the more laughable the whole joke.

She had been only just in time in extorting her promise from Mr.

Weston. She was sure of this from his manner of speaking to herself.

It was extremely, syllabically distinct. To words that he had been p.r.o.nouncing correctly and without thought all his life he gave (as if he must find something superior for her, and knowing better all the time) p.r.o.nunciations marvellously new. He found new words, too; must look 'em up, Louie thought, in the dictionary. Richenda, who had begun by being his sweetheart, became his "intended," and once even his "inamorata." But he was to be trusted. Louie saw that. If he gave away her ident.i.ty at all it would be only by the portentousness of his secrecy. As a matter of fact he never did so.

It was the skimpy woman in the green plaid, Miss Windus, who answered most of Louie's questions about her new companions. She too was a delightful novelty to Louie. As if to make her own position quite clear at the outset, she had confided to Louie at once that she herself was "partly independent." Seeing Louie's slightly puzzled look, she had gone on to explain that by this she meant that she enjoyed an income of perhaps a pound a week "on her own." With this t.i.tle to consideration thoroughly understood, she went ahead. When Louie asked a question about the high-heeled little c.o.c.kney Jewess, Miss Levey, Miss Windus answered it in terms of her own pound a week.

"Miss Levey?" she said. Oh, she'd nothing; she lived at home and had her fees paid for her, of course, and wouldn't stick fast, being a Jewess, not she; but Kitty didn't suppose Miriam Levey had one shilling to rub against another; not, that was, "on her own." Louie, finding other questions answered from this same standpoint, took her cue and framed her questions accordingly. Had the other female student (there were only four women), Miss Soames, anything? Well, Kitty didn't know; she fancied her aunt must have a tidy bit coming in; they lived together in a boarding-house in Woburn Place, and as the aunt did nothing all day perhaps she too was partly independent, or even wholly so. Had Mr. Merridew, the swaggering boy who cheapened his clothes so curiously, a tidy bit coming in? Here Kitty evidently had a tale to tell. Had Archie Merridew a bit coming in, indeed! Why, his father was Mr. Merridew of Merridew and Fry's, the fancy stationers with branches everywhere, so Louie could judge for herself whether that meant a bit or not! Archie a bit? Why, Mr. Merridew Senior had retired, and lived at a big place near Guildford, with a tennis-lawn, if you please. Archie Merridew a bit!--Then what about Mr. Mackie?

(Louie might have been estimating people by what money they had all her life.)--Mr. Mackie? No, Kitty shouldn't think Mr. Mackie had very much, but he had a splendid "permanency" offered him when he had pa.s.sed his examinations, as an auctioneer's clerk, four pounds a week to start with--to start with, mind you--and a "rise" every year. Yes; Mr. Mackie was all right, and, oh dear! _wasn't_ Mr. Mackie funny?

Louie thought this Mr. Mackie more than funny; in her inexperience of the type she could never believe he was quite true. For Mr. Mackie sang songs, imitated music-hall artistes, could "gag" for a whole day on end, and never forget for a moment the immense success he was. He fascinated Louie. "Ladies and bipeds in trousers!" he would begin, with rapid gestures and still more rapid speech, "before the applause I am waiting for has had time to subside--good word, subside--(thank you, Cuthbert, you can take the bouquet round to the stage-door)--as I was saying when Fitzclarence interrupted me, ladies and tripeheads in blouses, whoa, backpedal, never mind--as I was saying, I will now endeavour to give you my celebrated imitation of Roderigo the gasfitter at one o'clock on a Sat.u.r.day with the thirty bob in his pocket and Hildegarde Ann his wife licking the paint of the lamp-post at the corner to squench her thirst--_heu_, her thirst!... Chord on, please, t.i.tillate the catgut, Professor, and take firm hold of his hand, girls----"

Then, while the eyes of Lord Moone's niece would grow bigger and bigger, would follow the performance.

"_Isn't_ he funny!" Kitty would giggle, faint with laughing; "oh, give us some more, Mr. Mackie!"

And Kitty, like Saint Paul, died daily at yet another trick of Mr.

Mackie's--the putting of his handkerchief to his nose, and the drawing of it slowly downwards to the accompaniment of a piercing whistle.

But Louie was only moderately amused by young Merridew. Mr. Mackie had his own perfection; but vulgarity _with_ a tennis-lawn! "Good gracious, no," said Louie.

She had entered the School as a day student; but within a week she had put her name down for the evening cla.s.ses also. Even then she had the evenings of Tuesdays, Thursdays, Sat.u.r.days and the whole of Sunday quite unamusingly on her hands. She did not want time on her hands. As much Mr. Mackie as you pleased, but no time on her hands. So she joined the cla.s.ses that met on the evenings of Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

On her very first evening she saw a student whom she had not seen before.

She had taken a text-book on Elementary Book-keeping from one of the shelves of the =E= of books in which she had had her first talk with Mr. Weston (who, by the way, had said that he would like to see her for a few minutes before she left that evening), and finding a chair within the recess, had sat down where she was to read it. She had not looked up when somebody had pa.s.sed the mouth of her little compartment and entered the next one. She had heard a book taken down from a shelf behind her, and, after some minutes, put back again; and had she not chanced to straighten her back at that moment she would probably not have seen the man repa.s.s. She had no time to notice more than that he was very big and not very well dressed. She went on with her reading, wondering, in the intervals of her slack attention to her book, what Mr. Weston wanted with her.

She saw the big man again at the close of the cla.s.s. This time he was standing at the head of the stairs, waiting for young Merridew. He really was immensely big, so big that a too prolonged first look at him seemed unpleasantly like impertinent curiosity. Indeed, he seemed already to feel her eyes upon him, for he moved as if to look back at her in turn; but young Merridew came up at that moment and they went out together. The big man's head and shoulders were to be seen beyond the handrail for quite an appreciable moment of time after young Merridew's had disappeared. But she had been wrong in thinking that he wore a shabby suit. His suit might be shabby also, but it could not be seen. He wore, and had apparently worn in cla.s.s also, a tawny old ulster of yellow and black check. In spite of its age it seemed somehow a better garment than did the more expensive clothes of his companion. He did not, however, strike her as very amusing.

She turned away to seek the Secretary Bird--Mr. Weston.

For the moment Mr. Weston was engaged. He was standing near the lecture-room blackboard, talking to the girl who lived with her partly independent aunt at the boarding-house in Woburn Place. Louie had already remarked the likeness of this girl, who might have been twenty but looked younger, to Polly Ross, the pretty daughter of the tipsy veterinary surgeon at Trant. Polly too had sported that running of pale blue ribbon beneath the openwork of what Kitty Windus called her "pneumonia blouse," and the clumps of dark hair on her nape too was like Polly's, and she had Polly's dark and sidelong glance, and highly conscious air of unconsciousness when that glance had attracted what it had probably been meant to attract, attention to herself. She had a copy of the Pansy Library in her hand, and Louie smiled as she remembered Burnett Minor and her spoutings. She waited until Weston should be at liberty.

As she waited, Kitty Windus, wearing an Inverness cape and a boat-shaped hat, came up. Miss Windus lived in a street off Tottenham Court Road, and already once or twice Louie had walked with her as far as the Oxford corner. She was waiting for the Polly Ross girl now, whose direction was the same. She asked Louie whether she intended to walk or to "hop on a bus." She always spoke in these rather sprightly terms, just as she always stiffened the line of her back a little the moment a man, any man, entered the room; and she referred, brightly and hopefully, to proposals of marriage as "chances." Louie was already learning when she might expect any given one of Kitty's innumerable _cliches_, and had several times (humorously) given them back to Kitty again with complete success. As they waited for the Polly Ross girl (whose name was Evie Soames) Louie asked Kitty who the big man who had gone out with Mr. Merridew was.

"Oh, the Mandrill!" said Kitty, laughing even before Louie had got out the word "big." "That's Mr. Jeffries. Isn't he a caution? But he only comes in the evenings."

She meant that Mr. Jeffries had not a pound a week on his own.