In Accordance with the Evidence.

by Oliver Onions.

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 advertis.e.m.e.nts 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt)--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 bra.s.s knocker and bellpulls, and a white-washed area inside the railings to make the bas.e.m.e.nt 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 circ.u.mstances 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 sh.e.l.l 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 _minutiae_. 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.cious 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 pa.s.s 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 n.o.body 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 p.r.o.ngs 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 habitue 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 Pa.s.sage. 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 cla.s.s, 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt.

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, advertis.e.m.e.nt-writing. Later, I myself took this cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.ses. 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d 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 att.i.tude 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 circ.u.mspection 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 s.e.x-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 att.i.tudes she took in reaching down a book from a shelf or pa.s.sing her arm about the waist of one of the other girls when they a.s.sembled for gossip were all I wanted of her, and those began and remained a purely aesthetic satisfaction.

Therefore there could hardly have been a more complete contrast than there was between these apparently a-s.e.xual yet in reality excessively s.e.x-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 spa.r.s.e 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.