The Story Of Louie Part 24

She had courted him--what a conquest! She had made him say she was pretty--what a victory! She had schemed, planned, ensured her kisses--what a triumph!... Why, she now asked herself for the first time, had she wanted to triumph? Why had she not seen sooner that what she had really wanted had been to be triumphed over? Triumph?--It came to her with a strange newness that women didn't triumph by triumphing.

That man with the back like the church door, for example, who had just gone out with that pretty snippet----

Instantly, and with extraordinary resilience, her mind established a contrast.

No woman would have to cajole this shabby, lion-eyed man into admiration of her beauty. Rather she would have to save herself from his onslaught--and then, in her very flying, she would triumph. Louie had found a fool invincible; but this other, when he loved, would go down with the vehemence of his own a.s.sault. When Louie had refused to kiss Roy at their parting she had not known exactly why she had done so: she had obeyed an instinct; a chapter had been closed, and had had to be marked as definitely closed; her heart had known no rancour against him. But now!--she might just as well have kissed him. Now, in this strange place, two strange people--or rather one, for the girl mattered nothing--had in a moment, and infinitely, enlarged her sense of what, at any rate to a man, love might mean. In the light of that enlargement any kiss she could have given to Roy would have meant nothing--nothing, nothing. Poor Roy, whom she had had to woo! This other would do his own wooing. Why, he was doing it now----

Then a startling recollection caused Louie to sit suddenly upright.

This lion, who had given those looks at that girl--this shabby giant, whose face she had just seen enheavened out of all knowledge--had told young Merridew, who had told Kitty Windus and Miriam Levey, that his heart was set on somebody outside this poky little Business School altogether!

Involuntarily Louie drew a long breath of amazement.

He had told them that!

Then Louie became matter-of-fact. There was one thing and one thing only to be said. If Mr. Jeffries had told him that, Mr. Jeffries had--lied.

She turned it over again--she found no flaw in it.

Yes, if he had said that, he had lied.

Louie pondered. The result of her pondering was that she said slowly to herself: "Ah--this is going to be more than amusing--unless I'm mistaken it might even become dramatic."

Up to the moment of this astonishing discovery--for Louie knew that she had made a discovery--Mr. Jeffries had been to her a phenomenon, different from Mr. Mackie and Kitty Windus, but not to be observed very differently; now in a twink she placed him in quite another category. Or, if she still lacked a category in which to place him, she certainly removed him for ever from the other. He had called suddenly on her profounder attention, and, as if he had struck upon a rock, the waters of it gushed forth. Apparently to others he was a b.u.t.t, a jest, a pathetic figure; he was not that to Louie Causton now.

They had said, Kitty and the Jewess, that Evie Soames and the red-waistcoated boy, off to Guildford together to-morrow, would before long be engaged to be married; but Mr. Jeffries, the third person in the commonest of dramas, and Mr. Jeffries, the introducer into that drama of a preposterous, impossible fourth actor, whose name Miriam Levey was resolved to know, were not one and the same man. Louie sat astounded again at his lie. It struck her as really in its way stupendous. Others thought he was below his fellows in this shabby little hutch of a Business School; not so Louie now! She saw those clear yellow eyes again. Ruses and machinations lived in them. A b.u.t.t, with his brown-paper parcel? A pathetic figure, with his cadged baths?

No--good gracious, no! The faces of b.u.t.ts and pathetic figures were rather less capable of irradiation. This man's kind made great somethings--great men, great saints, great lovers--if it came to the worst great criminals. Had she, Louie, been that jaunty young man in the red waistcoat, she would have chosen for a rival and enemy anybody she had ever seen rather than this needy, gigantic Mr. Jeffries, who made this barefaced attempt to throw dust into people's eyes by means of apocryphal women he was "after" elsewhere.

And he helped this youngster he must hate with his studies--cadged on his probably-to-be-successful rival for a bath.

He was masked too, then.

Yes, at this dingy School in Holborn Louie had found something even more interesting than amus.e.m.e.nt.

IV

--_a_

Louie had not yet allowed herself much time for fear of what was to happen to herself physically; she had amused herself too heartily. She bought chocolates and hated the smell of tobacco; and so far that was all. What hung over her was as inevitable as Death, and for that reason was, like Death, to be kept at arm's-length as long as possible.

But she had already seen enough of Richenda's sister to be aware that in all probability her stay in Sutherland Place would not be a long one. Mrs. Leggat was formally kind, to Lord Moone's niece rather than to herself; but for the rest an armed neutrality seemed to exist between the two women. The Leggats were childless, and for that reason the less likely to be charitable. Louie had, in fact, found the social layer that is bounded on the one hand by the wickedness of pugilists and on the other by the scapes of young gentlemen about to enter the army. Within these limits Virtue reigned--not always harshly, always consciously. Not the wives of the Caesars (it seemed to Louie) were above suspicion, but the Mrs. Leggats; not the saints, who confessed that they were tempted, but the Westons, who did not know of temptation's existence. It was as if some unseen, august Mrs.

Lovenant-Smith had decreed that landladies and teachers in business schools did not do these things. And they did not.

Louie went to the house of Richenda's father, the bookseller--once.

She had no wish to go again. As Richenda had described him there had been something tragic about him; to Louie he had appeared merely as a grey-bearded, rheumatic, complaining old man, a picture of pathos without dignity. And those six other Richendas, of various ages, struck her as horribly superfluous. She wanted Life's colour, not its greyness; she greatly preferred the garnish, incredible Mackie.

The weeks pa.s.sed. Weston came regularly on Sunday mornings, and on Sunday afternoons she took long walks. On the nights when there was no cla.s.s she rode on buses, along Oxford Street, down Regent Street to the Circus, and back by Park Lane to the Marble Arch and Notting Hill Gate again; or sometimes she went Paddington way, up the Harrow Road and out and back through Kilburn. She began to know something of the streets of London. Her health was far better in London than it had been at Rainham Parva. It was perfect. She still feared nothing.

The Christmas Examinations drew within sight, and hand in hand with the preparation for them another and a more lightsome preoccupation engaged the School. This was the Christmas Social with which the last term of the year always closed. An Executive had been formed; on it Louie's name appeared; and it met frequently at the close of afternoon school. One of the younger students was sent across to the teashop over the way for scones and cake; a kettle was set on the general-room fire; and the social was discussed over tea.

Mr. Mackie was the life and soul of these meetings. He was especially strong on the subject of whether evening-dress was to be obligatory, permissible or debarred. He declared himself at one of the earlier meetings as out and out for fancy dress, but was outvoted.

"See me as a Woodbine, girls, beg pardon, miss-cue, a Columbine, I mean, nearly cold with the kilt, kilt with the cold, I should say, sixpence in the box for the opera-gla.s.ses, Gerald, but don't ogle me while mother's in the wings, wishing she was twenty-one again--good old mother--

"'Here's to the happiest hours of my life, Spent in the arms of another man's wife-- My Mo-the-rr!'"

(The shake on the long note produced by a rapid play of Mr. Mackie's fingers on Mr. Mackie's Adam's apple.) "Thought I'd have to backpedal, didn't you, Miss Causton? Nay, fear not, fair damsel, the intentions of Ferdinando are honourable, as long as you watch him, pip-pip, phee-ooo!" (The shrill whistle behind the handkerchief closed the strophe.)

But this was rushing matters. Kitty Windus spoke, no doubt on behalf of the students who hadn't a pound a week on their own.

"Fancy dress would keep a good many away," she said. "I should love it, but it really is an expense, you know."

"Weston can buy a penny bottle of gum and come as a foreign stamp."

"Do be serious, Mr. Mackie, now! We want the social to be for everybody here----"

"_And_ their friends," Miss Levey interpolated, with a look of private understanding at Kitty Windus. There was a short interlude between the two women.

"You _won't_ find out, Miriam!"

"I _vill_!"

"Did you offer him tickets for the Holborn?"

"Yes; but he vouldn't buy them."

"Doesn't Mrs. J. as-is-to-be dance?"

"I don't know. He vouldn't buy the tickets."

"I'll bet you another half-crown you don't get him there, let alone her!"

"Done vith you, Kitty Vindus!" cried Miss Levey excitedly.

Here Mr. Mackie interposed. "Who's that? Jeffries? He can come in his ulster as Boaz--_heu_, how Ruthless! (Beshrew me, but have I not a pretty wit?)"

"He's got that new brown suit to come in--or did he get it second-hand, Archie?" asked Kitty.

"New," quoth Archie authoritatively. "Allworthy's, in Cheapside. Two ten."

"I nearly died when he turned up without that old ulster!"

"Vasn't it screaming?" simpered Miss Levey. "No, don't, Archie!"

(Young Merridew was pulling out the frill of her jabot.)

"Do tell us exactly what he said when you congratulated him on his engagement, Evie!" said Kitty Windus, turning to Evie Soames.