All, all gone now was the hour of exaltation in which I had heard the nightingale sing and had felt my glowing girl's breast heaving against my own. I was a hungry, desperate man, living a life against which I knew I should not be able to bear up indefinitely, and already glancing into the public-house as I entered by my side door and beginning to wonder whether they were not wiser than I who made use of the anodyne of drink. Why not drink, and forget for at least an hour? And one night, meeting Mackie again, and having eaten little, I did succ.u.mb, and for the first time in my life got drunk. I got drunk at his expense. He had heard the news of Louie Causton, and wanted to talk about it. I, like a cur, let him.... I broke away from him at last, but not until my loosened tongue had said I know not what.

My relation with Evie during this time is difficult to define. She never quite put me back again into the place I had occupied before that Sat.u.r.day when we had heard the nightingale together, but newer preoccupations overlay this relation. Archie now had money (I never knew quite how much) at his command; but he still showed no sign of putting it to the use Miss Angela, if not I, had expected--that of entering into a formal engagement with Evie. Miss Angela found excuses for this out of her own imagination--that his father had only lately died, and so on; but I could have set her right even then. I knew how things were drifting. From the little I remembered of my talk with Mackie, Archie had found in his coming into money quite another opportunity. What might have facilitated his marriage with Evie actually delayed it. He was getting rid of his money in Leicester Square again.

So Evie's name was a.s.sociated with his, and yet there was no plighting between them, and Evie swayed, now happy but with a fear, now despairing, but not hopelessly so. There was no trouble she could have brought openly to me even had she wished, but nevertheless she often turned to me significantly full of silence. She, Kitty and I often walked homewards together through the sweltering streets, and when Evie had left us Kitty would speak her mind freely about Archie Merridew.

"He's one of the Jewness Dorey now!" she exclaimed one evening, taking the phrase, I don't doubt, from one of her "better cla.s.s" novels. "And it's no good saying it's got nothing to do with us! I think _you_ ought to give him a talking-to!"

This was in the typewriting-room of the college, within ten minutes of the close of an advertis.e.m.e.nt-writing evening.

"What can I say to him?" I asked. "It's no business of mine." She little knew how much I had made it my business.

"Oh, that's just like a man!" she said impatiently, all aglow with the _esprit de s.e.xe_. "The poor child's moping and fretting, and you say it's no business of yours! Of course it's the business of _all_ her friends!"

"Of all her women friends, maybe," I answered. "Well, if that's so, why don't you and Miss Angela have a talk about it?"

"As if we hadn't--twenty!" she cried. "You and your bright ideas. It isn't fair--it _isn't_ fair to Evie!"

"But what is it you hope for?" I asked.

She stared. "Why, that he'll marry her, of course!"

"Quite so. But I don't mean that. I mean, do you and Miss Angela think you can bring any pressure to bear?"

"Yes, I do--young idiot!" she broke out. "He ought to be ashamed of himself!"

And I didn't doubt that a certain amount of pressure might be brought to bear. If it was made less trouble for Archie to marry than not to marry, he would probably marry. He had not manhood enough, if it was clearly shown that marriage was expected of him, to hold out. And I knew how those marriages turned out.... I meditated.

"But," I objected, "why meddle? You know what a marriage of that kind would be! You see what he is anyway!"

But here I had touched Kitty's limitation. For her, as for her novels, marriage was the end of the story. If joybells closed it nothing after that mattered, and the look she gave me was a personal confirmation.

"But," she went on presently, "you could help, Jeff. We women can't talk to him--though he's not getting very many smiles from _me_ just now!"

I smiled. "You're an unscrupulous crew," I remarked.

"Will you see him?"

"Well--I won't say I won't."

"But _will_ you?"

"Perhaps--if I see a fitting opportunity."

"A fitting. Look!" Her voice dropped. Evie had just come into the typewriting-room on her way to wash her hands before leaving. "I'll tell you what," Kitty said quickly; "you go along with her now. See if it isn't as I say. Then tell me whether you won't give that little idiot a dressing-down at once."

She had quite forgotten that twinge of jealousy that had been the cause of our recent scene. If she hadn't, the more honour to her sense of s.e.x comradeship. It was about this time that I was beginning quite frequently to forget that our relation was that of lovers, and as long as I could forget that, she had pathetic little magnanimities that I even admired.

"All right, if you wish it," I said.

So for once Evie's society was absolutely thrust upon me.

That night she was all that Kitty had said--plunged in despondency. She was, of course, "in love with" Archie, but that after all is only a generic expression. Even love comes down to cases, and I think that in her case, even then, she was wondering whether, had things happened a little differently, she might not have been equally "in love" with somebody else. Of that I myself had never a doubt. With Archie's money, or even a decent job, I would have flouted the whole world in my triumphant security that I could make her mine. And I should do so yet.

Though for the present my power might go a-begging, I vowed that it should yet be taken and richly paid for. The dark and solid houses were less solid than that something I knew to be within myself, that makes and unmakes houses and streets and towns and lands.... But gently, gently; I was not out of the mire yet; by-and-by would be time enough for these boastings; things must go on as they were for a little while longer.

So though I did not speak a word to her that night that bore directly on the case as Kitty understood it, I did more. I did--I know this now--make her feel that, glooms and delights apart, she had in me an affectionate friend to whom she would not come with troubles in vain. I have been told, and am inclined to believe it, that I have this power with women.

And her eyes were soft with friendship as I left her.

"Good night, Jeff," she said fondly, as I took her hand. "I do like being with you sometimes."

And that night, as I lay half suffocated in the room I did not even pay rent for, the words rang like a chime in my head until the morning noises marked the beginning of another torrid day.

The commissionaire's job I spoke of I got in an odd way. I got it through the combination of my unusual size with unusual strength. I was walking along Fleet Street that day when a horse fell, and I, with others, helped to raise it again. When we had finished, a man at my elbow spoke both casually and penetratingly.

"That was as good as anything I've seen for weeks," he said. "Have you had much practice in holding a whole horse up while the others fasten the buckles?"

I laughed. I had certainly had the heavy end of the job, but "Not quite that," I said.

He gave me a scrutinising look. "Out o' work?" it seemed to say; but he did not speak the words.

"Here, come and have a drink," he said.

His name was Pettinger. He was a sporting journalist, and so a judge of "form" and "condition." I was not in the best of either, but I must have struck him as having "the makings" of I don't quite know what. He gave me a drink, which I didn't want, and a plate of sandwiches, which I did want rather badly; and he also gave me, as I say, this commissionaire's job. Pettinger is a friend of mine to this day; and since he is a simple and lovable animal of a fellow (he fully concurs in this description of himself) he is the only man I can bear to speak much to about that time when, clad in a sky-blue uniform, I kept the door of his newspaper office, touching my cap to proprietors, and being jocularly prodded by sportsmen and journalists, as if I had been an ox at Smithfield Show.

II

It was about this time that Archie Merridew's light was once more beginning to show regularly, evening after evening, over the leads of his top floor near the Foundling Hospital. This was after a period of months during which his abode had been in complete darkness. But as his visits to the college had become infrequent, and as I did not know what he might be up to, I had kept away.

When, some little after my commission from Kitty, I did look him up again, it was by no means that I might deliver Kitty's message. I went, rather, as a matter of attention to detail. There were certain things I could not afford not to know, and, more important, there were certain appearances I could not afford not to keep up. Nevertheless I did not dream with what consequences my visit of that evening would presently be fraught.

I was in a state of great nervous irritability before I went. The weather still continued almost insupportably hot, and to my other discomforts had been added a new perturbation that worked on me none the less that in all probability it was quite groundless. The evening papers had started a scare about "low-flash oil"; my red and green room was little cooler than a furnace; and I had lately begun to glance at my cheap lamp from time to time as if it had been a bomb. I mention this merely as an indication of the state to which I was becoming reduced. I thought of that lamp, I remember, as I walked from the college to Archie's rooms that night and half hoped in my peevishness that the thing had exploded in my absence.

It was only ten o'clock, but Archie was already in bed. He wore blue silk pyjamas and on a small table by the side of his bed stood a medicine bottle and a siphon; but when I asked him whether he was ill that he had need of these last he made light of them. It was this beastly weather, he said, and perhaps the beastly weather also accounted for his drinking the milk that Jane presently brought up in a sealed bottle. When Jane had gone, Archie, with an attempt at his old disarming impertinence, turned to me and said, "Well--how's the blue uniform, Jeff?"

Ah! He knew of that!

"Didn't think I'd heard, did you?" he grinned. "Well, I only did hear yesterday. Nothing to be ashamed of, old chap. I know one of your fellows, you know----"

I too knew the sub-editor whose name he mentioned. He was something of a bird of the night too. Already the fact that Archie knew of my occupation had set me swiftly revolving the new dispositions I should certainly have to make in my relation to Kitty and Evie.

"Ah, yes," I said. "I shouldn't attempt to drink with the sub-editor of a sporting paper if I were you. You've been trying, I expect," I added, looking suspiciously at him. He seemed drawn and ill. He never had any stamina.

"Sha'n't tell tales out of school," he replied, with another weak attempt at his old facetiousness. "Well, how's the fair Kitty?"

Ill as he was, I could have boxed his ears for the tone of it, but I answered his question, and he grinned again.