Part 7 (2/2)

I failed completely. Not even the thought that my pa.s.sionate resentment was a force to be confined as it were in a boiler, and only to be allowed to escape by the way that would prove effective, restrained me from clenching my fists and gritting my teeth as I recalled the image of his pretty and ignorant and conceited face; and I am afraid I ”let go”

utterly. I walked by way of Chancery Lane and Bouverie Street to the Embankment; I crossed Blackfriars Bridge, and after that I don't quite know where I went, trying to forget my hunger, and trying to shake off my hideous grudge against the world that threatened to crash over the head of the egotistical whipper-snapper I had left.

I have related this at some length because it was the first time, but not the last, that that devil of sensitiveness took me in quite that way.

VIII

I had not exaggerated when I told Archie Merridew that I might find some difficulty in obtaining from Rixon Tebb & Masters' leave of absence for the day of the Method examination. That examination was fixed for a Friday, a fortnight and some days after my refusal to set fork into that fragrantly steaming Surrey fowl of Archie Merridew's, and this falling on a Friday added to my difficulties.

Or rather I should say that it added to Polwhele's difficulties, for it was to Polwhele I looked once more to find a way out for me. For Friday was a wage-day, and since I must have my eighteen s.h.i.+llings in order to live, a mere covering of my absence would not suffice. The cas.h.i.+er would have to be taken into the arrangement.

But Polwhele had by now to some extent got over his dread, if not over his hatred, of me. When I put the matter to him he refused. This was in the street, during the luncheon hour. The louse refused to help me, and turned away.

Exactly fifteen minutes later I had bearded the cas.h.i.+er himself, catching him at the door as he was returning from his meal.

At first he looked at me as much as to say, ”Did _I_ speak to _you”_?

Then, finding it impossible to pretend he didn't know who I was, he said, ”What is it?”

I told him what I wanted, concealing only my reason for wanting it; and, after his first astonishment that I had taken the absolutely unprecedented course of addressing a request otherwise than through the usual channel, I found him not unmanageable. As a matter of fact, things were slack, and there was only one kind of labour that Rixon Tebb & Masters' would have preferred to that it had from the agency at eighteen s.h.i.+llings a week--namely, a ”floating margin” waiting on the pavement to be taken on for an hour or two as it might be required. Gayns saw a chance of saving a day.

”You don't expect to be paid for that day, do you?” he said.

”No,” I replied.

He thought for a moment. ”All right,” he said. ”You can come for your fifteen s.h.i.+llings on Thursday night.”

And Polwhele set another mark against me, that I had approached a superior over his head.

As I entered the Business College at half-past ten on the morning of the examination it suddenly struck me that I had never been inside the place in the daytime before. By gaslight it was, as I have said, dingy enough, but by daylight it was shabby in the extreme. I walked round the rooms, noticing for the first time that the shorthand and typewriting rooms, which looked on the side street to the east of the block, were by far the lightest rooms on our top floor, and that the library in which I had received Evie's congratulations was little more than a thick twilight, which the cleaning of the single grimy back window that looked out over yards and chimney-pots would probably not greatly have improved. The room adjoining that, the old ledger-room, was not, except for the small high square of gla.s.s that gave on the head of the stairs, lighted at all.

They had made, too, quite extensive arrangements for the occasion itself. We had been warned that we should not be allowed to leave the premises until the examination was over, and as far as possible separate s.p.a.ces had been provided for each of the twenty-five candidates--compartments of screens hired for the day from some furnisher or shop-fitter, and open at the ends to the gaze of the half-dozen perambulating guardians of the probity of examinations who looked as if they too had been had in for the day on the same terms as the screens. The contrast between the new fittings and the old wallpapers and chandeliers struck me. And I remembered that even now, when I had been debited my three s.h.i.+llings to be present, I did not see the place in its normal daytime aspect at all.

The papers were to be distributed at eleven, and at a few minutes before that hour we were all a.s.sembled. A man called Mackie and myself were the only two candidates for the Honours paper, and he and I were kept well apart--I told off to a seat in the middle of the lecture-room, he isolated in the typewriting-room. Evie, timorous about her Elementary, was separated from Archie Merridew (who occupied the box between Miss Windus and a pale student, Richardson) by the whole length of the general room. We took our places; in all the rooms at once voices were heard reading some cautionary form or other (my policeman gave me the most mistrustful of glances as he p.r.o.nounced the words ”expelled from the examination-room and your paper cancelled”); the papers were distributed on the stroke of eleven, and the examination began.

I need not trouble you with what it was all about. The importance of that day to me was quite unconnected with the paper on Method. I ought, however, to say that the paper was in reality two papers, the first in Theory and the second in Practice, with the interval for lunch dividing the two. I mention this only to explain how it was we came to be all talking together when, a little after half-past one, our first papers had been collected and we were free to unsnap our satchels or untie our parcels of lunch.

Despite my reduced income that week I had provided myself with a sumptuous lunch--two kinds of sausage from a _delicatessen_ shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, a paper of potato salad, a roll, b.u.t.ter, some sort of chocolate _baba_ or _moka_, and a bottle of Schweppes' dry ginger ale. That lunch had cost me nearly three s.h.i.+llings--but I intended to eat only a third of it. The rest was to be my chief sustenance during the two following days. I was not among my porters and drivers now--oh no! I was cutting quite a dash. Archie, pa.s.sing with Miss Windus as I opened my black satchel, did not forbear to remark, ”By Jove! doesn't Jeffries do himself well, what?” and it had been in order that I might be a.s.sumed to ”do” myself equally well every day of my life that I had made my little display. I ate my exact third in the same compartment I had written my examination paper in, and then, closing my bag on the precious remainder, put it under the seat and mingled with the others.

By a sort of natural selection, I presently found myself in the middle bow window, discussing the questions he had just answered with my only fellow-candidate in Honours, Mackie. Mackie, both at the college and elsewhere, was one of these blatantly popular chaps, and I myself didn't like him. In some respects he was rather of Archie's kind, but he was older, more knowing, and had gone further. He was a singer of comic songs at ”smokers,” and a frequent looker-in at the s.h.i.+lling dances at the Holburn Town Hall after cla.s.s. He was jubilant over the ease of the Theory paper, and was already so confident of his pa.s.s that he was cracking jokes right and left, as if a weight had been taken off his mind.

”It's going to be like money from home if it's no harder than that!” he exulted (almost prophetically, if what I said about the standard of modern examinations is true). ”Kitty Windus says she'll eat her mackintosh, with the accent on the 'tosh,' if she isn't all right for the Advanced, and the Elementaries are as safe as your hand in your pocket! What ho! Come out on the stairs and have a Flor de Cabbagos.”

I didn't want the Flor de Cabbagos, but I went out on the top landing with him. One or two others were smoking on the floor below, which was as far as we were allowed to stray. A few steps down Miss Windus and Miss Causton were sitting on the stairs, as if they were sitting out a dance, and Miss Causton moved lower down still as the fragrance of Mackie's ”Flor” reached her, and then a little way back again as she caught the whiff that came up the well. Mackie was talking of the paper again.

”All that mugging for a job you could do on your head!” he said, with regret for the time he had lost. ”I wouldn't have dropped out of the billiard handicap if I'd known! Play billiards, Jeffries? I'm a regular John Roberts--in my dreams. Give you fifty in a hundred at the Napier when teacher says we can go.”

And he ran on, with dull facetiousness.

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