The Story Of Louie Part 38

She did not offer at once to sit to Billy; it was a fortnight later that she screwed up her courage to do so. During that time she thought the matter out. Perhaps the stark simplicity of the thing attracted her. No acquirement she was ever likely to possess would greatly improve her circ.u.mstances; it would probably be the same to the end of the chapter--cash-desk, waitress, Earls Court--Earls Court, mannequin, and a private secretarys.h.i.+p with an offer of double wages. At two colleges she had learned little or nothing; she lacked application; but here was something that quietly brushed acquirements aside--something that went flagrantly by favour. It was femininity reduced to its simplest statement. She had no fear of Billy Izzard.

She guessed that to him she would be little more than a more complex whitewashed cube or cone or pyramid.

She did not even colour when she made her proposal to him....

"But I expect you'll go off to old Henson or some other swell presently," he sighed, as she stood before him....

And of course Chaff, barring her face that was best suited with a large shady hat, had given her her testimonial long before.

Buck was furious. The original, genuine Pilgrim of Love had reason enough to know what happened in studios. Young women of high birth (in Louie's case it would probably be a young man) began to take their lunches there, and one day burst into jealous unhappy tears, and after that the Pilgrimage began. But Louie only laughed at him. She reminded him that she had reason to regard herself as a pilgrim too. At that Buck looked hard at her.

"Little woman," he said slowly, "d'you mean--that there is somebody?"

Louie laughed again, but more consciously.

"Once or twice lately," Buck continued, still looking hard at her, "I've wondered whether there might be----"

"How can there be, daddy?"

"Well, the other isn't befitting," said Buck, shaking his head and returning to the original point.

"My daddy did it."

"Ah, men's different. For high ladies it--it isn't befitting."

"I'm not a young girl, daddy."

"No." Buck sighed. If he had only known her when she was a young girl!

But the whims of the Scarisbricks were still the Scarisbricks' whims, and as such above his judgment. "But I want to see this Mr. Izzard,"

he added grimly.

"That you certainly sha'n't," Louie replied promptly. "Fancy your taking me round everywhere I go!"

"Everywhere?" Buck repeated, alarmed anew.

"Of course. If it's a business it's a business. Why, Mr. Izzard alone would be--dreadful! It's no good, daddy; you can't change my mind."

He saw that he could not, but he still tried. It only delayed a little her carrying of her point. In the end--well, she was her mother's daughter. There was no more to be said.

So she began to make the round of the Chelsea studios, and presently moved, with Celeste and the boy, to more comfortable quarters in Lavender Hill, Clapham Junction. This took her farther from her work in Chelsea, but brought her nearer to the Lambeth and Westminster Schools of Art, where also she obtained sittings, sometimes during the day, sometimes in the evenings also. She sat for Billy when Billy could afford to pay her. "No, no--no tick, Billy," she told him once; "I don't do this for amus.e.m.e.nt." Of the boy Billy knew nothing....

Buck, still strongly averse from the whole proceeding, at first refused to hear her gossip of the day's work; but, as his silence did not alter matters, little by little he began to come round. Soon they exchanged experiences quite freely. He told her what Sopley had said about his deltoid, Henson about his thigh. "You vain old daddy!" she said, stroking his cheek, "I believe for two pins you'd do it again!"

She took a pleasure in fondly shocking him in the same sort. Sometimes he mused long. You will admit that it was something to muse over. And so--well, so Louie, throwing acquirements aside with her clothes, became, by virtue of her peculiar commodity, economically emanc.i.p.ated.

As female models, women are eminently better than men.

She did fairly well at it. So well did she do that from the three rooms in Lavender Hill (the third one Celeste's) piece by piece her landlady's furniture began to disappear. Her own took its place. She intended, when she had enough of her own, to save the difference in rent between furnished and unfurnished quarters by taking a small flat. So her two chests of drawers and her wardrobe were her own; so were much of her cutlery and bed and table linen; and so, of course, were Jimmy's various paraphernalia. But she was not ready to leave yet. The summer of 1900, she thought, would be early enough.

And in one particular at least she was now able to hold up her head.

She still owed money both to Buck and Chaff, but she knew as much about the struggle for a livelihood as Richenda Earle herself. And she had not grizzled. Life had not knocked her out. She was her father's daughter after all.

And yet, once more, she felt herself her mother's daughter too. The reason, which was not very far to seek, was this:

The earlier stages of that furtive romance that in the end had left her former husband no Rest but the Grave were known only to Mrs.

Chaffinger herself. Henson had not guessed them; Lord Moone had seen only the resultant scandal of them. But Louie understood a little now.

She could at least guess what had happened to her mother between her first setting eyes on the splendid Buck and that final petulant, pathetic cry: "Oh, that I should have to beg a man to marry me!" By sympathy she was able now to divine the sighs, the half-acknowledged longings, the half-shamed daydreams, the revulsions, the sinkings back again. For Louie now knew something of these things within herself.

Not that there was not harder stuff in Louie. There was. There was, for example, that sense of proportion which is humour. How could her thoughts of Mr. Jeffries not be rather preposterous? She found it difficult sometimes to remember even his personal appearance; she had well-nigh forgotten his voice; many idle repet.i.tions had dulled the memory of that odd little thrill she had felt when her hand had lain in his. True, she remembered these things in a way. She remembered the tawny bulk of him, the lion's eyes, the gloss of his hair, the modeless fas.h.i.+on of his speech; but these were mere noted facts, no more hers than everybody else's. Yet what (she asked herself) had become of her sense of humour that she should want something of him that n.o.body else had? What had happened to her sense of proportion that she did not forget him as she had forgotten scores of people of whom she had seen far, far more? And how had it come about that, for one thought she cast on Roy, Mr. Jeffries had twenty? And why this new and curious understanding of her mother?

She asked herself these questions behind the grilles of her cash-desks, behind the counters of her Earls Court stalls, posing or crocheting on her model thrones, riding backwards and forwards to her sittings or what not on the tops of omnibuses. Usually she answered herself more or less like this:

"It looks very much as if I was making of him what he seems to have made of that Soames girl--a sort of _idee fixe_; if I were to fall really in love now, I suppose I shouldn't think any more about him.

Luckily it doesn't matter; it's my own affair. Good gracious, suppose he knew! He'd think me as imbecile as I am!--There I go again!" (This probably, some minutes later.) "Suppose I _had_ met him earlier, and things _had_ been different--what about it? What's the good of remembering all that now? Well, it puts the time on down this beastly Kennington Lane.... Thank goodness I'm not likely to come across him; I can't help thinking something would happen if I did.... Poor mother!" she usually ended inconsequentially, "I suppose she'd be about my age. I'm turned thirty--thirty-one in fact--shall have to stop counting soon. Time you stopped counting when it occurs to you that your mother had dreams just as silly as yours----"

And so, whether this Mr. Jeffries meant much or little to her, he did not mean so much but that any trivial near occurrence--a cold of young Jimmy's, a cold of her own that prevented her from sitting for a day or two, or a fall in the crochet-market--put Mr. Jeffries and the wild and tangled ideas that seemed to cloak his image temporarily quite out of her thoughts.

When early in the year 1900 she got regular sittings for a time with an artist who lived in St. John's Wood, she never went up or down Tottenham Court Road in the Victoria bus without half expecting to run across Evie Soames, who lived in Woburn Place. Because she did not meet her, she concluded that very likely she lived there no longer.

But, late on a windy afternoon in March, at about the time when the street lamps were being lighted, she did meet her.

It was opposite the Adam and Eve, in Euston Road, and on either of the two women's parts there was a curious momentary hesitation. If Evie Soames still lived in Woburn Place and was going home, the first bus that came would do for her, and Louie had already seen her glance as it approached; but as it happened, that bus was the Victoria bus for which Louie herself was waiting. Louie spoke; it seemed to her that not to speak would be to apologise, by silence, for that episode in her career that had brought Kitty Windus in haste to the Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. A large parcel she was carrying gave her an excuse not to shake hands.

"How do you do?" she said.

Something, she could not have told what, had instantly drawn her eyes to the girl's attire. Evie Soames was wearing a black jacket and black fur cap, but the wind, turning the jacket aside, showed the narrow black and white stripes of the blouse beneath.

"Oh--fancy meeting you!" Evie said, turning her dark eyes as if she had only that moment seen Louie. There was something in her manner that Louie interpreted as meaning, "Very well, if I've got to be cordial I'll _be_ cordial!" "Are you going by this bus?" she added.

"Yes."

"Oh! Where are you living now--Putney?"

It may be that Louie met any slight the last word might have conveyed half-way and more. She replied, a little shortly: "No, Lavender Hill; I change at Victoria. After you----"

"Oh no--after you!"

Louie ascended; they couldn't stand on the kerb discussing points of precedence. "Let's go in front," Evie said, "and then men won't smoke on us," and they settled down.

"Well," Evie said, adjusting the ap.r.o.n, "and how are _you_?"

"Thank you," said Louie, "perfectly well."

"There's room for your parcel here. Such ages since we met! Let me see, when was it?"

They discussed when it was, and then, "And have you seen Kitty Windus lately?" Evie asked.

Since her first visit to the Hickleys' Louie had seen Kitty perhaps half-a-dozen times in all, not oftener. Kitty had been to Margate, thence to Whetstone, and after that to Alf Windus the violinist's.

Louie had simply not been able to see her oftener; she had had far too much to do. And, after all, nothing (the nothing of Louie's fears and fancies) seemed to have happened. Except to herself (Louie guessed) Kitty made no mysterious allusions to black eyes. She was merely puzzled, pathetic, harmless. She had not that perilous thing, a preconceived theory into which events had a fulfilling way of dropping of themselves. So Louie replied to Evie Soames in a tone as casual as her own:

"Oh yes, I've seen her several times. Of course you heard that her engagement to Mr. Jeffries was broken off?"