And that was why, with Kitty always at hand for her excuse, she did not write to him.

In a word, the joy of bearing for him was becoming fainter in proportion as the burden itself increased.

Then a piece of news with which Kitty came home one night added its trifle to her smart. She was alone in the flat that night; Jimmy had been in bed two hours and more, and Louie, after having folded his clothes, cleared up his litter of toys from the floor, and tried to read a newspaper, had turned low the gas, drawn up a chair to one of the three windows that looked down on the New Kings Road, and sat gazing out over the trees and houses and scattered lights that stretched away to Earls Court. It happened that that night the Exhibition was closing for the season; a firework demonstration was in progress; and out of the little pool of orange light rockets rose from time to time, falling again in slow showers of red and green and white. If no cart was pa.s.sing she could just hear the m.u.f.fled detonations.

She knew that if an impossibility could have happened, and Jim could have walked into the room, sat down by her, and watched the white and green and red rockets with her, that slight constant smart at her heart would have gone; but now she told herself that it was not as if she was young, with unlimited time before her. She was thirty-two, and too much absence is not sustenance enough for thirty-two. But that, she supposed, meant nothing to a man. Men did not appear to get old in quite the same way. The man who had tried to make love to her at the French picture exhibition was sixty if he was a day; sixty, and still fiery; and apparently he had found her still desirable also. But it was not for much longer. Women died with their beauty. Of course she had her little darling asleep there; men had the comfortable theory that women wanted nothing more than to "live again" (as they called it) in their children; well, all that Louie could say was that she did not agree with them. She knew one woman who wanted more. It might be wicked and unnatural to endow Jimmy, as she had done, with a sort of vicarious father, but Roy was gone out of her life--gone; to have married him would have made more mischief than it would have cured; and Louie saw no reason for not telling herself the truth about herself. But a vicarious father who stayed away was altogether too vicarious....

Well, well, she supposed that if a woman would have a man at all she must put up with a selfish one.

He, of course, knew exactly what he wanted, and had got it; nor could she say that he had not earned it--grimly. But now that he had got it, what about somebody else who was helping him to keep it--somebody called Louie Causton, who stepped in when she was wanted, took half the burden off his back, and was presently sent about her business again? (For she had remembered now the quite personal, preoccupied questions, about Kitty and Miriam and his wife, that he had put to her on the night of their long walk.) Oh, no doubt she would be there when she was next wanted, to share with him the thing another woman ought to have shared (but thank goodness the other woman had not!). It had not in the least surprised Louie that his wife knew nothing. It would have surprised her very much indeed if she had known anything. Jim might humbug himself as he liked, but at the bottom of his heart (she now saw) he knew better than to tell her. She was not the kind; it was Louie who was that kind, and he knew it too. But there: she was pretty, and men asked no further; give them hair and eyes and an unlined brow and the rest could go hang. Heart and vision--no; courage and devotion and the strength to bear--no; but twenty years, a curving eyelash, and a bloom more quickly gone than the falling rockets yonder, and ah, how they ran! But they didn't trust them. No, the other sort was sent for then. And it was the business of the other sort to be, always, as strong as they sometimes thought themselves.

The last rocket fell; the lights of the big wheel began to make quicker revolutions; and Louie left the window and turned up the gas again.

As she did so the electric bell in the kitchen rang. It rang again, and then Louie remembered that the street door four floors below would be closed for the night. She pa.s.sed out on to the landing and descended the stairs. It was Kitty. She had forgotten her key. Kitty panted as they ascended again.

"How long have you been in?" she demanded, as she took off her hat and coat in the little hall.

"All the evening," said Louie. "Have you had supper?"

"No, I haven't," said Kitty shortly, and then came her grumble. Why hadn't Louie had the gas lighted? Fireworks indeed! And there Kitty had been waiting for twenty minutes and more, thinking n.o.body was in--anybody might forget their key once in a while, mightn't they?

Hadn't Louie forgotten hers not a week ago, and that not the only time? Kitty had a right to forget her key sometimes. And there had Louie been in all the time, watching fireworks! Well, what was there for supper? And the fire almost out too; really, if Kitty paid for the coals, Louie might at least keep the fire in!

Louie mended the fire and got Kitty's supper. When Kitty had finished she cleared the little round table again, and by the time Kitty had put on a pair of red bedroom slippers and turned up her skirt to the blaze she deigned to relent a little. She admitted that it wasn't as if Louie had known she was waiting in the street, but all the same it was annoying.

"And now I've got a piece of news for you," she said, warming her hands. "It's a dead secret, but I don't suppose Miriam would mind my telling you. She's in for no end of a good job in a few weeks! But she always gets good jobs. She has determination, Miriam has, you see."

Louie was standing by the end of the mantelpiece, stirring a cup of cocoa. She only said "Oh?" Her own lack of determination was now an old reproach.

"Ra-_ther_! Have you heard me speak of a Mr. Pepper ever? But no, you won't have; you're always a bit sniffy about Miriam, you see, and that doesn't encourage people to talk. Well, she's his confidential clerk at the Freight and Ballast Company, but he's chucking that, and who do you think with?--James Jeffries!"

She paused to see the effect on Louie, and then continued.

"Yes, James Jeffries! What do you think of _that_? They're going to start on their own, in no end of a swell way, and Miriam's going over with them. It's Mr. Pepper's doing, of course, and as Mr. Pepper isn't exactly a n.o.body even where he is, you may bet your boots he won't change for the worse! Oh, James Jeffries knows the kind of person to hang on to! He's to be a partner, if you please, as good as Mr. Pepper himself; how's that for greasing in? Friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, I _don't_ think!"

Kitty had this way now of speaking of her former _fiance_. Sometimes she so extended his name that it became "Mister James Herbert Jeffries." And however Jim now "got on," his advancement would still be, to Kitty, a magnification of her own superiority in those days when she had had a pound a week and he nothing. She began to take out hairpins and went on.

"Oh dear, I wish my brushes were here!" (Louie fetched them.) "What was I saying? Oh yes, about Miriam. She's to have an office to herself, perhaps, or at any rate she's not going to sit with the other girls; and when I tell you it's in Pall Mall, you can judge for yourself--not just a couple of offices rented, but a whole building--what ho! The stone that the builders rejected if you like!

And she'll have her own extending-bracket telephone, the very latest, and arms to her chair to put her elbows on, not like the typists! And Mr. Pepper's most friendly with her--she takes down his conversations with no end of swells! And I say, Evie Jeffries won't be half set up over it all, oh no! Even _his_ office--James Herbert's, Miriam says--is going to be perfectly scrumptious!"

Her head was on one side; her short hair, as she brushed it, hardly reached farther than the sharp point of her shoulder; and Louie was thinking of that spurious engagement again. And suddenly--this had happened before, but never before with so keen a stab--the thought set her raging.... She herself had been so near!... Her elbow caught her cup of cocoa; it spilt, and ran in a little stream from the corner of the mantelpiece.... So near! And once again she cried to herself that _she_ would have known how to keep him, Roy or no Roy!... Kitty? What could his courtship of Kitty and her bones have been? _She_ would have shown him the difference! To have been so near and then--Mortlake Road, Putney!

Suddenly there seemed to her to be a great deal to be said for conventional morality after all.

For a moment her heart was full of hate--hate of Kitty, hate of Evie Jeffries, hate of Roy, hate of herself. To have been so near!

But the sharpness of it died down to a sullen ache. In his affairs he seemed to be going up, up; she had always known he would; and less than ever might she expect to hear from him now. And he would take his common little wife up with him. He might go anywhere, meet anybody; but sourly she wondered what sort of a figure he supposed his Evie would cut up there--would have cut at Trant or Mallard Bois? Oh, Louie would dearly have liked to see her there, to have pointed to her, and to have told Jim to his face that whatever ability he might have seemed to be yoked with an unimaginable stupidity, since he had not known instantly the one woman for him.

Well, there was simply no accounting for these things.

But if he was going up, Louie did not very much like the channel by which she had received the information. She had known that Kitty saw Miriam Levey; now she seemed to hear her thick voice again, "I _vill_ find out!" She was aware, too, that there was little love lost between Miriam Levey and herself. She herself had encouraged Kitty in her present att.i.tude of "Mister Jeffries," but it only needed the Jewess to propose the contrary att.i.tude and in all probability there would be a struggle between them for the possession of Kitty. She detested Kitty; yet in order that Evie Jeffries might make an exhibition of herself among the people whose equal Louie was, Louie had to put up with her, bones and chilblains and all! Much he left her, didn't he?

Good gracious, yes! And it was about time he was told that flesh and blood women weren't made like that!

Kitty, remarking that it was a shame to leave the now glowing fire, had pa.s.sed out of the room for a minute; she now returned, in her slippers and nightgown. Her feet, she said, were still cold with waiting on the pavement; she would say her prayers with them turned to the fire. She knelt by a wicker chair, and set the red slippers on the low kerb, their worn soles to the fire. Louie, still from the end of the mantelpiece, watched her. At a slight sound she made Kitty turned her head for a moment; then she put it on the cushion of the chair again.

Yes, certainly Louie must have a wicked heart, or she would not have looked on the kneeling woman as she did. She wondered what, texts apart, Kitty could have to say to G.o.d. To pray--with her feet in a warm place! Why, Louie mortified herself more for an absent man than Kitty seemed to do before her Maker!... And even when she had stifled the thought she still had no more than a negative compa.s.sion for Kitty. She was not unsorry for her and her weakheadedness; beyond that Kitty was not, or ought not to have been, her affair. What was her affair was herself and what little remained of her youth. Kitty was hardly more than a year or two older than she, but she looked a dozen years older; Louie wondered whether her shoulder blades too would soon resemble the set-squares in Billy's studio, whether her waist also would seem a broken thing within empty looking folds....

Kitty continued to pray and to warm her feet. Louie, wondering what her next snappishness would be when she rose from her knees again, continued to watch her.

Then Kitty rose. She turned to Louie.

"By the way, did you brush that blue skirt of mine?" she said. "Oh, very well, it doesn't matter now; perhaps I oughtn't to have asked you; thank you; I can do it myself in the morning. Sorry I spoke."

Louie turned away.

These were the times when she could hardly tell what had possessed her ever to have supposed that she would be able to keep watch and ward over Kitty at all. Kitty was perfectly free to meet Miriam Levey or anybody else she had a mind to meet. And why, she asked herself at these times, should she not meet her? Where, hanging and such moonshine apart, was the risk to Jim? Indeed, it seemed to Louie that that story that seemed so to weigh on Jim was quickly becoming altogether beside the mark. The whole venue of his difficulties was rapidly shifting. What he had done had not been discovered and probably never would be discovered; what he wanted now was, not to be protected from remote and shadowy and nonsensical dangers, but to be told how he was to be happy with the wife whom he had seen fit, in the great heap of his wisdom, to keep in ignorance. Of course the remoter danger need not be entirely forgotten, but this, or else Louie was greatly mistaken, was what those scarce-heard questions on the night of that long walk had really meant.

And, in that case, what the devil was she, Louie Causton, doing in this gallery at all, with nothing of Jim but silence and absence, and nothing but peevishness and petty tyranny from Kitty? Roy, it might be, was still ready to marry her; Buck never ceased to importune, sulk and implore; Jimmy, one way or another, would be to provide for; and she knew now how little she could do for him alone. Even her desire to "show" Richenda Earle had now pa.s.sed. She wanted, desperately wanted, all the things she persisted in rejecting. Why was she becoming morose, disillusioned, devil-may-care? It was a familiar question now, but as she undressed that night she asked herself again what it all meant.

She answered herself that there was no mystery about it. She supposed it happened to every woman. It meant, of course, the pa.s.sing of her youth.

But, her head on her pillow, she had her compensating hour. No need to re-describe its kind; there was now added again that forced and desperate illusion, of the unity of herself, her boy, and the man she would have had his father. She knew she merely abused her fancy and must suffer for it afterwards, but no matter; if it was a drug it was a sweet one, and that it might stay with her a little longer she chose uncomfortable positions that would keep her awake. She could hear Jimmy's breathing across the dark room. Jim, Jimmy and herself----

It was against her own will that, at two o'clock in the morning, she slept.

IV

It was his voice over the telephone of the Models' Club that broke the long silence. Ten chances to one but the bell had rung in an empty room, for, save for a woman who was washing the hall floor, Louie was alone in the place. She unhooked the receiver. "Hallo!" she called.... "Yes, this is the Models' Club.... This is Miss Causton...."

At last!

He did not say why he wanted to see her; he only said that he wanted to do so at once. His minimised voice, with its suggestion of distance, seemed to her curiously symbolic of their whole relation. A telephone was supposed to bring voices near, but far more than that the smallness and the distance struck her.

"No, I'm afraid not," she continued to speak into the instrument, "but I can give you dinner here. You know the address?... Yes, at seven....

All right...."

Seek him? No, she certainly would not seek him. He must come to her.

She could give him tea and chops. As she hung up the receiver again she glanced at the clock over the little service counter. Eleven.

Eight hours.... She had waited for months, now she must wait another eight hours. She could have faced the months again with more composure.

Only to look at the advertis.e.m.e.nts in the papers had she come to the Club that morning at all. Well, she was not going to answer that clairvoyant's announcement she had seen in _The Telegraph_ now. Kitty would ask her that evening whether she had been looking for work, and would hold up Miriam Levey and her determination as an example; let her; Louie couldn't be bothered with clairvoyants and their advertis.e.m.e.nts to-day.

And Kitty little dreamed how near Louie had more than once been to showing herself as determined even as Miriam. Miriam was not the only one who might be "taken on" at this new Consolidation of Mr. Pepper's and Jim's, whatever it was. There is such a thing, when a man doesn't come to you, as a miserable, ign.o.ble yielding to the ache to go to him. There is such a thing as the willingness even to keep a door all day for the sake of seeing him go through it just once. After a certain time pride becomes a poor staff, and--but he was coming, in eight hours. That was why she had refused to dine with him. Your pride stiffens again when you have just been on the point of throwing it aside.

She knew that she would be good for nothing for the rest of the day; in that case she might as well go and see her father. She had money enough for her bus fares; half-past one found her at the Molyneux Arms.

Buck was in high feather. His name had been proposed, in the interests of Church and State, as a candidate for the Borough Council; and the chief plank of the platform which Buck occupied during the whole of that afternoon, descending from it with the greatest reluctance only when Louie vowed that she could not stay another moment, was that as long as England had Queensberrys to make her P.R. Rules it didn't matter what Radicals tried to make of her laws. Louie fondled his silver hair; dear old dad! Then she made him drive her back to Chelsea.