CHAPTER XLI
Meanwhile, of a Sunday evening, Miss Poppy Grace wondered why Ricky-ticky never by any chance appeared upon his balcony. At last, coming home about ten o'clock from one of his walks to Hampstead, he found Poppy leaning out over her balcony most unmistakably on the look-out.
"Come in and have some supper," said she.
"No thanks, I fancy it's a little late."
"Better late than never, when it's supper with me. Catch!" And Poppy, in defiance of all propriety, tossed her latch-key over the balcony. And somehow that latch-key had to be returned. He did not use it, but rang, with the intention of handing it to the servant; an intention divined and frustrated by Poppy, who opened the door to him herself.
"Don't go away," she said, "I've got something to tell you."
"Not now, I think—"
Her eyes were hideous to him in their great rings of paint and bistre.
"Why ever not? It'll only tyke a minute. Come in; there's nobody up there that matters."
And because he had no desire to be brutal or uncivil, he went up into the room he knew so well. It being summer, the folding doors were thrown wide open, and in the room beyond they came upon a large lady in a dirty tea-gown, eating lobster. For Poppy, now that she saw respectability departing from her, held out to it a pathetic little hand, and the tea-gown, pending an engagement as heavy matron on the provincial stage, was glad enough to play Propriety in Miss Grace's drawing-room. To-night Poppy made short work of Propriety. She waited with admirable patience while the large lady (whom she addressed affectionately as Tiny) followed up the last thin trail of mayonnaise; but when Tiny showed a disposition to toy with the intricacies of an empty claw, Poppy protested.
"Hurry up and clear out, there's a dear. I want to give Rickets his supper, and we haven't got a minute to spare."
And Tiny, who seemed to know her business, hurried up and cleared out.
But Rickets didn't want any supper, and Poppy was visibly abstracted and depressed. She mingled whipped cream with minute fragments of lobster, and finally fell to torturing a sandwich with a spoon; and all with an immense affectation of not having a minute to spare.
"Well, Ryzors," she said at last (and her accent jarred him horribly), "this is very strynge behyviour."
"Which?"
"Which? Do you know you haven't been near me for two months?"
He laughed uneasily. "I couldn't be near you when I was away."
"Never said you could. But what did you go away for?"
"Business."
"Too busy to write, I suppose?"
"Much too busy."
She rose, and with one hand on his shoulder steered him into the front room.
"Sit down," she said. "And don't look so sulky. I want to talk to you sensibly."
He sat down where he had sat that night two months ago, on the Polar bear skin. She sat down too, with a sweeping side-long movement of her hips that drew her thin skirts close about her. She contemplated the effect a little dubiously, then with shy nervous fingers loosened and shook out the folds. He leaned back, withdrawn as far as possible into the corner of the divan. The associations of the place were unspeakably loathsome to him.
"Look here, dear"—(In Poppy's world the term of endearment went for nothing; it was simply the stamp upon the current coin of comradeship. If only that had been the beginning and the end between them!)
"I haven't a minute—but, I'm going to ask you something" (though Poppy hadn't a minute she was applying herself very leisurely to the making of cigarettes). "Don't go and get huffy at what I'm going to say. Do you happen to owe Dicky anything?"
"Why?"
"Tell you why afterwards. Do you owe him anything?"
"Oh, well—a certain amount—Why?"
"Why? Because I think he owes you something. And that's a grudge. It isn't my business, but if I were you, Rickets, I'd pay him orf and have done with him."
"Oh, that's all right. I'm safe enough."
"You? It's just you who isn't. Dicky's not a bad sort, in his way. All the same, he'd sell you up as soon as look at you. Unless—" (for a moment her bright eyes clouded, charged with the melancholy meanings of the world) "Unless you happened to be an orf'ly pretty woman." She laid her right leg across her left knee and struck a vesta on the heel of her shoe.
"Then, of course, he'd sooner look at me."
Poppy puffed at her cigarette and threw the vesta into the grate with a dexterous jerk of her white forearm. "Look at you first. Sell you up—after." Then Poppy burst into song—
"Oh, he is such a nice little boy,
When there's nothing you do to annoy;
But he's apt to stand aloof
If you arsk him for the oof,
And it's then that he looks coy.
Oh, he'll show the cloven hoof,
If you put him to the proof.
When you want him to hand you the boodle
He's not such a nice little boy.
"Yes, dickee, I see you!"
The canary, persuaded by Poppy's song that it was broad daylight, was awake and splashing in his bath. Again in Poppy's mind (how unnecessarily) he stood for the respectabilities and proprieties; he was an understudy for Tiny of the dirty tea-gown.
"Going?"
"Yes. I must go."
"Wait." She rose and held him by the collar of his coat, a lapel in each small hand. He grasped her wrists by an instinctive movement of self-preservation, and gently slackened her hold. She gave his coat a little shake. "What's the matter with you, Rickets? You're such a howling swell."
Her eyes twinkled in the old way, and he smiled in spite of himself.
"Say, I'm a little nuisance, Rickets, say I'm a little nuisance."
"You are a little nuisance.
"A d——d little nuisance."
"A d——d little nuisance."
"Ah, now you feel better, don't you? Poor Ricky-ticky, don't you be afraid. It's only a little nuisance. It'll never be a big one. It's done growing. That is, I won't rag you any more, if you'll tell me one thing—oh, what a whopper of a sigh!—Promise me you'll pay Dicky off."
"All right. I'll pay him."
"To-morrow?"
"To-morrow, then. Don't, Poppy. I—I've got a sore throat." For Poppy, standing on tip-toe, had made an effort to embrace him.
"I sy, if you blush like that, Rickets, you'll have a fit. Poor dear! Did I crumple his nice little stylish collar!"
He endured while she smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle, her head very much on one side. "You see, Razors, we've been such chums. Whatever happens, I want to be all right and straight with you."
"What should happen?"
"Oh, anything." Again there was that troubling of the bright shallows of her eyes. "You remember larst time you were here?" (his shudder told her that he remembered well). "I did try to send you away, didn't I?"
"As far as I can remember, you did."
"What did you think I did it for?"
"I suppose, because you wanted me to go."
"Stupid! I did it because I wanted you to stay." She looked into his eyes and the light went out of her own; among its paint and powder her audacity lay dead. It was as if she saw on his face the shadow of Lucia Harden, and knew that her hour had come.
She met it laughing. "Good-night, Ricky-ticky."
As he took her hand he muttered something about being "fearfully sorry."
"Sorry?" Poppy conjured up a poor flickering ghost of her inimitable wink. "The champagne was bad, dear. Don't you worry."
When he had left her, she flung herself face downwards on the divan. "Oh, dicky, will you hold your horrid little tongue?" But as she sobbed aloud, the canary, symbol of invincible Propriety, rocked on his perch and shook over her his piercing and exultant song.
Rickman was sorry for her, but the sight and touch of her were hateful to him. He took her advice however. He had had good luck with some articles, and he called on Pilkington the next afternoon and paid him his thirty pounds with the interest. Dicky was in a good humour and inclined to be communicative. He congratulated him on his present berth, and informed him that Rickman's was "going it." The old man had just raised four thousand on the Harden library, the only security that he, Dicky, would accept.
"I suppose," said Rickman simply, "you'd no idea of its value when you let him buy it?"
Dicky stared through his eye-glass with his blue eyes immense and clear.
"My dear fellow, do you take me for a d——d fool?"
So that had been Dicky's little game? Trust Dicky.
And yet for the time being, held in the opposing grip of two firm cupidities, it was safe, the great Harden library, once the joy of scholars, loved with such high intellectual passion, and now the centre of so many hot schemes and rivalries and lusts. Now that the work of sacrilege was complete, housed at last in the Gin Palace of Art, it stood, useless in its desecrated beauty, cumbering the shelves whence no sale would remove it until either Rickman's or Pilkington let go. So far the Hardens were avenged.