The Story Of Louie Part 39

"Oh yes," said Evie, looking straight in front of her.

"Have you seen her, then?"

"Oh no. But of course Mr. Jeffries himself would know, wouldn't he?--that is, if you call it breaking off when a person just disappears without saying where she is or anything about it. Don't bother to unb.u.t.ton; I have some pennies----"

But Louie also had pennies. "Any more fares?" the conductor called, and then went downstairs again. The two women fell into a silence. The early lamplight came and went on their faces as the bus jogged on.

Presently the silence seemed to have taken almost the character of a contest as to who should speak next, with either resolved that it should not be herself. Louie knew perfectly well what was the matter.

Miss Soames might speak glancingly of Mortlake Road and offer to pay her bus fares, but really she hated Louie because of Louie's discovery in the old ledger-room on that examination day that now seemed so long ago. The girl seemed to be still in some sort of half mourning--but Louie did not want to think much of that and all that it might mean.

Rather desperately, she strove to forget that she had ever had a theory about what might have driven Evie Soames into black and of what might happen when she went into colours again. She must, she told herself sharply, have a hideous mind ever to have thought these things. Indeed, she was so short with herself about it that, relinquishing the contest of silence, she again made the small immediate thing banish the large shadowy one behind.

"Do you ever see Miriam Levey nowadays?" she asked suddenly.

"No," Evie replied. At any rate she had not been the first to speak.

"Oh? But aren't she and Mr. Jeffries at the same place now?"

"Yes, I believe they are--in fact, I know they are. I suppose Kitty told you?"

"Yes."

"Poor Kitty! But let me see: was Miriam at the office when Kitty came to Mortlake Road? I thought it was after that she went."

"I've seen Kitty more than once," said Louie, compressing her lips.

The bus was slowing down opposite the Oxford.

"Ah, yes, you said so. Well, remember me to her when you see her again, won't you? I get down here. I hope you'll get your parcel home all right; it's rather a large one, isn't it? Good-bye."

As Evie Soames's figure was lost in the crowd that jostled in the lights of the Horse Shoe Louie did not look round. She was too angry.

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed, "the insupportable little creature!

Why, I never looked at one of my mother's housemaids so! _De haut en bas_--her to me! But I did catch you that day, Miss Polly Ross, and you know it!"

But as the bus moved southwards again, she was trying once more to forget that white stripe in Evie Soames's dress. She did not want to think that anything had suddenly seemed to come a stride nearer. And she would now rather not have been told, what apparently was the fact, that, whether frequently or not, Evie Soames did see Mr. Jeffries.

The parcel she was taking home contained a dress; she had been sitting in it; but it was not the oyster-grey. The old oyster-grey, too, served to bring her nearer to her mother and that weak flicker of romance long ago in Henson's studio. Not for worlds would she have had Celeste see the idiotic looks she sometimes gave that dress in which she had danced with Mr. Jeffries. And sometimes she would suddenly toss it aside, roughly, anyhow. She was not seventeen (she would tell herself), to moon over a flower a man had given her or a dance programme on which he had scrawled his name. She was a woman of turned thirty-one (she rubbed it in), with her living to earn and an illegitimate son to provide for.... But sometimes she was very wistful too. She had never (she sighed) really been a girl of seventeen at all; looking back, she saw that she had missed that. She blamed n.o.body; no doubt she had been unruly, ill-conditioned, unmanageable; still, she had missed that. The thought always sent her off into her reveries again; and then, how differently, how much more admirably, she was able to plan everything to herself! Over and over again she built it all up, unbuilt it again, rearranged it, played with it. Had she, as a girl of seventeen, met Mr. Jeffries--had this circ.u.mstance been different, that particular not been the same--had she nursed no grudge against her mother--had it been Mr. Jeffries, not Roy, with whom she had kicked her long legs during the vacations at Mallard Bois--had she, in a word, had the arranging of the world herself and the choosing of the places she and he were to occupy in it----

"Bosh!" she usually cut herself abruptly off. "I shall be afraid of turning a corner soon for fear of walking into the gentleman! What shall I take in for supper?"

She did not know yet--indeed it was only some months later that she learned it, but it is set down here--that already, at a Langham Exhibition, Billy Izzard had one day seen a big stranger standing before one of his sketches, had gone up and spoken to him, and had liked the fellow--had liked his hewn slab of a face with the yellow eyes in it so much that presently, having an old sketch he was never likely to sell, he had given it to him. But Billy would at any time rather give away a sketch to somebody he liked than sell one to somebody he didn't like, and he still set, moreover, less than their real value on those paintings of flowers that he "knocked off" in a couple of keen and nervous hours. One of these sketches, by the way, Louie herself coveted--a straggle of violets, a few white ones among them, in a l.u.s.tre bowl; and she offered a certain number of sittings in exchange for it--another elementary example of the transaction in kind. But Billy shook his head. He wanted that for a wedding present for a fellow, he said. He'd give Louie another some time--after he'd found another studio. He was sick of Chelsea; when a fellow got to know the cracks in the flagstones it was time he moved. He thought of going up north somewhere, Camden Town or Hampstead or St. John's Wood--better air. So Louie could make up her mind to the bus-rides, or else move too. He wasn't going to let Henson get hold of her.

But Louie still delayed to move from Lavender Hill.

III

Louie's adventures, as she continued to sit, would fill a book: but not this book. Her sittings were the accidents of her life; her real life she reckoned from Sunday to Sunday. Sundays were the blest days she devoted to Jimmy.

He was now nearly four years old, and (as Celeste continued delightedly to exult) "existed" and "manifested" indeed. Louie herself gave him her bath before she set out of a morning; she did so in a waterproof and little else--why, the splashed condition of the wall-paper in the poky little bathroom explained. It was the same old waterproof she had worn at Rainham Parva. Buck's admiration of the boy's chest and limbs was merely fatuous; he himself was teaching him to swim at the Public Baths. He had announced to Louie, with a great show of harshness, that the money she was fool enough to refuse, the boy would have the benefit of; that at least was something she couldn't prevent, he informed her, and though Louie scolded fondly back, it was a weight off her mind. Chaff, the other grandfather, came occasionally on Sundays; he came, for example, on the Sunday after the opening of the Royal Academy. He brought a catalogue with him, and, taking Louie into a corner, desired her to mark the numbers for which she had sat. Whether the poor old fellow meditated the buying of them all up, or what else, there was no telling. Her sittings, too, were "just like Mops." Perhaps that was more than some of the pictures were.

But it is not true, as has been reported, that for Henson's last picture, "Resurgam," Buck Causton and his daughter posed together.

Buck never posed after his first marriage. Louie only posed for Henson once, and that was in wet drapery. She caught a pretty cold in consequence. She exulted in that cold; it gave her three whole days with little Jimmy. They played with tops and b.a.l.l.s and soldiers on the floor. The boy wanted an ensign's uniform, like that of the fourth Lord Moone in the miniature, and Chaff bought him a dragoon's helmet and cuira.s.s. Buck laughed because the cuira.s.s was already too small; and then he sighed. Perhaps he remembered the suit of armour of Big Hugo at Mallard Bois.

Well, if a little money was all that was necessary, the boy could be put into the army by-an-by.

And so things might have gone on had they been destined to do so; but into Louie's life of busy sitting and foolish dreaming and Sunday's rompings with her boy, there came a disruptive force. Kitty Windus brought it on a Sunday morning in early June.

Celeste was reading a story to Jimmy when she walked in; Louie was putting the last touches to a piece of crochet; and all three were awaiting Buck's arrival with the trap--he was going to take them to Hampton Court. She entered unannounced, and, to Louie's way of thinking, would have been better in bed. Her face seemed unusually small and thin; she spoke in a high, painful voice.

"Louie, I want to see you--quick----"

It was as if Louie too caught an instant alarm. Hurriedly she dropped her just-finished crochet and rose.

"What's the matter?" she asked quickly. "Come into my bedroom."

In the quite prettily furnished little bedroom Kitty began to walk rapidly to and fro. Once or twice she turned her looks to the brown-papered walls, as if she expected to find texts there; for the rest the blinking little eyes roved ceaselessly at about knee-height from the floor. Then she stopped before Louie.

"They're getting married in a fortnight," she cried harshly, accusingly.

There is no need for Louie to ask who, nor did she know what instinct again, as before, bade her take up a definite att.i.tude without a moment's delay. She only felt in her very bones that delay would be perilous, and that not the shade of an expression must cross her face that was not natural and unsurprised.

"Yes, of course; didn't you know?" she said quietly. "Mr. Jeffries and Evie Soames, you mean?"

Again Kitty made that painful little sound--_a bouche fermee_. "You knew?" she cried.

A simple lie would not have availed; this was so obvious that Louie lied deliberately, circ.u.mstantially and at length.

"Yes, of course I knew. Of course I did. Do you mean to say you didn't? I made certain you did; I was going to write to you. In about a fortnight, isn't it? I'm--I'm giving them a wedding present; it's--it's that piece of crochet you saw me doing. It isn't much, but these things don't go by value; it's the intention. What are you going to give them?"

She almost blushed for the lameness of it. As a matter of fact, she had intended that piece of crochet for the new flat, when she should take it; but to soothe Kitty now was of more importance than crochet for new flats. She watched her covertly, anxiously.

"How did you know?" Kitty flashed out, again stopping in her walk.

"Sit down, dear; sit on the edge of my bed; I'm sure you're tired. How did I know? Why, I saw Evie herself. I saw her on a bus one day in Tottenham Court Road. It was near the Adam and Eve. And--I say, Kitty"--dropping her voice confidentially, she made an appeal to Kitty's hunger for gossip--anything for a diversion--"I doubt if they'll have too much to live on--it takes a tidy bit to get married on--and I don't suppose she has any shares to sell."

But Kitty did not seem to hear. She flashed out again.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"My _dear_! I made sure you'd heard it from Miriam Levey. And I wasn't sure where you were; you move about so, you know. I wonder what Miriam will give them! Something far more expensive than mine, I expect. And you ought to give them something too, Kitty. What's done's done, you know, and after all, lots of engagements are----"

But once more Kitty flashed out. "Oh, _I_ shall give him a bottle of arnica, or whatever it is, for black eyes!"

Louie laughed almost hysterically at the joke. The tension was getting almost too much for her. "Oh, come, he isn't a wife-beater yet!" she protested.

"But he will be, that man!" Kitty cried aloud with frightening vehemence. "He'd do anything--anything--much he cares! Did you know I got lost the other night? In Lincolns Inn Fields; policemen coming up to me, if you please, and asking me where I lived! Much he cares! I believe it was her all the time--he never wanted me at all, and as soon as Archie's out of the way he goes and marries her! Miriam Levey herself says she can't help thinking it's funny--and I can't think what _your_ game is either, to be going on as if it wasn't! I'll tell you what _I_ think, if you want to know----"

"Hush, hush, hush!" came from Louie. She had her arms about Kitty.