Love and Mr. Lewisham Part 28

"I see," she said.

They went on down in silence for a time.

"I suppose you will come up again?" he asked.

"I may try the botanical again--if they can find room. And, I was thinking--sometimes one hears of things. What is your address? So that if I heard of anything."

Lewisham stopped on the staircase and thought. "Of course," he said. He made no effort to give her the address, and she demanded it again at the foot of the stairs.

"That confounded nephridium--!" he said. "It has put everything out of my head."

They exchanged addresses on leaflets torn from Miss Heydinger's little note-book.

She waited at the Book in the hall while he signed his name. At the iron gates of the Schools she said: "I am going through Kensington Gardens."

He was now feeling irritated about the addresses, and he would not see the implicit invitation. "I am going towards Chelsea."

She hesitated a moment, looking at him--puzzled. "Good-bye, then,"

she said.

"Good-bye," he answered, lifting his hat.

He crossed the Exhibition Road slowly with his packed glazed bag, now seamed with cracks, in his hand. He went thoughtfully down to the corner of the Cromwell Road and turned along that to the right so that he could see the red pile of the Science Schools rising fair, and tall across the gardens of the Natural History Museum. He looked back towards it regretfully.

He was quite sure that he had failed in this last examination. He knew that any career as a scientific man was now closed to him for ever. And he remembered now how he had come along this very road to that great building for the first time in his life, and all the hopes and resolves that had swelled within him as he had drawn near. That dream of incessant unswerving work! Where might he have reached if only he had had singleness of purpose to realise that purpose?...

And in these gardens it was that he and Smithers and Parkson had sat on a seat hard by the fossil tree, and discoursed of Socialism together before the great paper was read....

"Yes," he said, speaking aloud to himself; "yes--_that's_ all over too. Everything's over."

Presently the corner of the Natural History Museum came between him and his receding Alma Mater. He sighed and turned his face towards the stuffy little rooms at Chelsea, and the still unconquered world.

CHAPTER XXVII.

CONCERNING A QUARREL.

It was late in September that this particular quarrel occurred. Almost all the roseate tints seemed gone by this time, for the Lewishams had been married six months. Their financial affairs had changed from the catastrophic to the sordid; Lewisham had found work. An army crammer named Captain Vigours wanted someone energetic for his mathematical duffers and to teach geometrical drawing and what he was pleased to call "Sandhurst Science." He paid no less than two s.h.i.+llings an hour for his uncertain demands on Lewisham's time. Moreover, there was a cla.s.s in lower mathematics beginning at Walham Green where Lewisham was to show his quality. Fifty s.h.i.+llings a week or more seemed credible--more might be hoped for. It was now merely a case of tiding over the interval until Vigours paid. And meanwhile the freshness of Ethel's blouses departed, and Lewisham refrained from the repair of his boot which had cracked across the toe.

The beginning of the quarrel was trivial enough. But by the end they got to generalities. Lewisham had begun the day in a bad temper and under the cloud of an overnight pa.s.sage of arms--and a little incident that had nothing to do with their ostensible difference lent it a warmth of emotion quite beyond its merits. As he emerged through the folding doors he saw a letter lying among the sketchily laid breakfast things, and Ethel's att.i.tude suggested the recoil of a quick movement; the letter suddenly dropped. Her eyes met his and she flushed. He sat down and took the letter--a trifle awkwardly perhaps. It was from Miss Heydinger. He hesitated with it halfway to his pocket, then decided to open it. It displayed an ample amount of reading, and he read. On the whole he thought it rather a dull sort of letter, but he did not allow this to appear. When it was read he put it carefully in his pocket.

That formally had nothing to do with the quarrel. The breakfast was already over when the quarrel began. Lewisham's morning was vacant, and be proposed to occupy it in the revision of certain notes bearing upon "Sandhurst Science." Unhappily the search for his note-book brought him into collision with the acc.u.mulation of Ethel's novelettes.

"These things are everywhere," he said after a gust of vehement handling, "I _wish_ you'd tidy them up sometimes."

"They were tidy enough till you began to throw them about," Ethel pointed out.

"Confounded muck! it's only fit to be burnt," Lewisham remarked to the universe, and pitched one viciously into the corner.

"Well, you tried to write one, anyhow," said Ethel, recalling a certain "Mammoth" packet of note-paper that had come on an evil end before Lewisham found his industrial level. This reminiscence always irritated him exceedingly.

"Eh?" he said sharply.

"You tried to write one," repeated Ethel--a little unwillingly.

"You don't mean me to forget that."

"It's you reminded me."

He stared hostility for a s.p.a.ce.

"Well, the things make a beastly litter anyhow; there isn't a tidy corner anywhere in the room. There never is."

"That's just the sort of thing you always say."

"Well--_is_ there?"

"Yes, there is."

"_Where_?"

Ethel professed not to hear. But a devil had possession of Lewisham for a time. "It isn't as though you had anything else to do," he remarked, wounding dishonourably.

Ethel turned. "If I _put_ those things away," she said with tremendous emphasis on the "_put_," "you'd only say I'd hidden them. What _is_ the good of trying to please you?"

The spirit of perversity suggested to Lewisham, "None apparently."

Ethel's cheeks glowed and her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Abruptly she abandoned the defensive and blurted out the thing that had been latent so long between them. Her voice took a note of pa.s.sion. "Nothing I can do ever does please you, since that Miss Heydinger began to write to you."

There was a pause, a gap. Something like astonishment took them both. Hitherto it had been a convention that she knew nothing of the existence of Miss Heydinger. He saw a light. "How did you know?" he began, and perceived that line was impossible. He took the way of the natural man; he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed an "Ugh!" of vast disgust, he raised his voice. "You _are_ unreasonable!" he cried in angry remonstrance.

"Fancy saying that! As though you ever tried to please me! Just as though it wasn't all the other way about!" He stopped--struck by a momentary perception of injustice. He plunged at the point he had s.h.i.+rked, "How did you know it _was_ Miss Heydinger--?"

Ethel's voice took upon itself the quality of tears. "I wasn't _meant_ to know, was I?" she said.

"But how?"

"I suppose you think it doesn't concern me? I suppose you think I'm made of stone?"

"You mean--you think--?"

"Yes--I _do_."

For a brief interval Lewisham stared at the issue she had laid bare. He sought some cras.h.i.+ng proposition, some line of convincing reasoning, with which to overwhelm and hide this new aspect of things. It would not come. He found himself fenced in on every side. A surging, irrational rage seized upon him.

"Jealousy!" he cried. "Jealousy! Just as though--Can't I have letters about things you don't understand--that you _won't_ understand? If I asked you to read them you wouldn't--It's just because--"