'Do as he tells you, and don't be a fool!'
There was a scuffle, a fall, a man's heavy breathing, a gurgling sound
of terror and suffocation. Rodd walked into the flat, and found the
woman who waited for him on the stairs lying on the ground, clutching a
bundle of bank-notes, while a little, mean-looking man was kneeling on
her chest, half throttling her, and trying to force the notes out of
her hand. The woman's mother was standing by shrieking aloud and
crying,--
'Do as he tells you, you b---- fool! He knows what's what. He's got
these blighters in a corner, and he'll make them pay.'
Rodd flung himself on the man, whom he recognised as the creature he
and Clara had met on the stairs. He picked him up and threw him into a
corner, where he lay, too terrified to move. The woman lay back
moaning and rolling her eyes, almost foaming at the mouth. Her bosom
heaved and she clutched the notes in her hand more tightly to her....
Rodd turned to the other two, and said,--
'Get out....'
They obeyed him, and he knelt by the woman and reassured her.
'Come now,' he said, 'out with the whole story before you've begun to
lie to yourself about it.'
'It's my own money,' she gasped; 'I don't want to do any more. It's
all fair and square, if he's paid. If a feller pays, it's all fair and
square.'
Rodd accepted the soundness of this rudimentary ethic.
'He wanted half and half, but it's my own money. I signed a paper for
it, and I'm not going back on my word. He wants me to. He wants me to
go into the Imperium so that he can get on to some of the swells....'
The Imperium? Rodd determined that he would have the whole story out.
He left her for a moment and locked the door. Then he lifted her into
a chair--it was a flashy furniture-on-the-hire-system room--gave her a
dose of brandy and began to ply her with questions,--
'Do you feel better?'
'Much better. I like being with you. You're so quiet. You'd
understand a girl, you would. I've often wanted to come and tell
you.... It fair knocked me silly when I saw you with her.'
'With whom?'
'Charley's girl.'
'Whose?'
'Charley's. Charley Mann's. He's my husband.'
Rodd was silent for some moments while he took this in.
'Who is this other--man?' asked Rodd kindly, beginning slowly to piece
the story together.
'That's Claude.... He was a lodger of mother's before she went broke
and had to come to live with me. He never let me alone. I wanted to
go straight, I did really.... Charley's not bad, and I thought I
should never see him again. I never thought he would make money. I
never thought we should see him swanking it in the papers, or I'd never
have had a word to say to Claude. I wouldn't really. Only Charley
getting married to the other girl----'
It struck Rodd like a blow in the face. Kitty did not mark the effect
of her story, and was not concerned with it. All she felt was relief
in the telling.
'I wanted money to send mother out of England. I couldn't stand it any
more. If it hadn't been for her there wouldn't have been Claude, and a
girl at the theatre can have a good time on her own nowadays even with
a kiddie. I've often wanted to tell you.'
'Does she know?'
'Charley's girl? Yes. She knows. It's a nice mix-up. Isn't it? And
Charley's not bad. He'll just lose you same as he would his hat. No
offence meant.'
She laughed hysterically.
'Who gave you the money?'
'A swell.'
'To keep your mouth shut?'
'Yes. Charley would have to go to prison. Claude's been in prison.
That's why he'd like Charley to go. Everybody who's been to prison is
like that. It makes them sly and hard.... But I say that Charley's
paid: six hundred. I'd never have got that out of him if I'd stayed
with him, would I?'
'I suppose not.... If there's any more trouble will you come to me?'
'I'd love to,' she said, perking up and casting at him the sorrowful
languishing glances with which she had pursued him for so long.
'Claude says he's pushed her on so quick and he ought to have done the
same for me.... Claude was at their wedding. I didn't know him then.
He's a friend of mother's. We thought he had money but he hasn't got a
bean.'
'I'll deal with Claude,' said Rodd. 'And if there is any more trouble,
mind you come to me.'
'It was all after my baby died,' said Kitty, as if to excuse herself,
but Rodd had accepted the story, and had no thought of excuse or
forgiveness. His thought was all for Clara.
How comic it was that he should have given her Mann's book! Did she
love Mann? She must have done. She could not have married him
else.... But then what was Verschoyle to her, that he should have paid
so large a sum in hush-money? A furious jealousy swept away what was
left of Rodd's intellectual world and released at last his passions.
His mind worked swiftly through the story, picking it up in time with
every thread.
Was she only an actress? Was the perfection which he had worshipped a
figment, a projection of herself in the character most pleasing to his
idealism? Impossible! There can be no feigning of purity, honesty,
joy. That is where the pretences of humanity collapse. In such a
pretence as that simulated passion--the ultimate baseness, breaks down,
creates no illusion, and is foiled.
But on the face of it, what an appalling story! It brought him
violently to earth. He could not move, but sat staring at the woman,
wanting to tell her that she lied, but knowing that she had spoken
according to the truth of the letter. Of the truth of the spirit she
could most patently know nothing. Her world was composed of dull facts
and smouldering emotions. She could know nothing of the world where
emotions flamed into passion to burn the facts into golden emblems of
truth. And that was Clara's world: the world in which for two days he
had been privileged to dwell, a world in which soul could speak to soul
and laugh at all the confusion of fact and detail in which they must
otherwise be ensnared.... Mann, Verschoyle, a swift success in the
theatre--the facts were of the kind that had induced the horror in
which until he met her he had lived. His meeting with her had
dispelled his horror, but the facts remained. He in his solitude might
ignore them and dream on, but could she? Surely he owed it to her to
offer her what through her he had won.... And then--to buy off the
wretched woman, surely she could never have submitted to that!
He began to think of Charles Mann with a blistering, jealous hatred.
'I think I'd have killed myself,' said Kitty, 'if it had gone on. I
don't wish them any harm now that he's paid up.... I wouldn't have
said a word about it to any one, only she's so young. It did give me a
bit of a shock, and Charles getting on, too. He's quite gray and has a
bit of a stomach. I never thought he'd be the one to get fat. I'm all
skin and bone. Look at my arms.'
Rodd left her. When he opened the door he was relieved to find that
the unpleasant Claude had gone. Mrs Messenger was sitting by the fire
in the front room, her skirts tucked up about her knees, and a glass of
port on the mantelpiece. She turned her head with a leer and said,--
'Good luck! I always thought she was keen on you.... It's time she
settled down. She was born to be respectable, and to look after a man.
That's all most girls are fit for. But in the theatre a girl's got to
look after number one or go down and out.'
The old woman with the painted face and dyed hair made Rodd's flesh
creep. She seemed to him a symbol of all the evil in the world, decay,
disruption, corruption, and with a flash of inspiration he discerned in
her the source of all this pitiful tangle of lies. A tender sympathy
entirely new to him took possession of his faculties and armed with
this he determined that he would not fail in whatever part he was
called upon to play in the drama of Clara's life.