I
SHE had practically, he believed, conveyed the intimation, the
horrid, brutal, vulgar menace, in the course of their last
dreadful conversation, when, for whatever was left him of pluck or
confidence--confidence in what he would fain have called a little more
aggressively the strength of his position--he had judged best not to
take it up. But this time there was no question of not understanding, or
of pretending he didn’t; the ugly, the awful words, ruthlessly formed
by her lips, were like the fingers of a hand that she might have thrust
into her pocket for extraction of the monstrous object that would serve
best for--what should he call it?--a gage of battle.
“If I haven’t a very different answer from you within the next three
days I shall put the matter into the hands of my solicitor, whom it
may interest you to know I’ve already seen. I shall bring an action for
‘breach’ against you, Herbert Dodd, as sure as my name’s Kate Cookham.”
There it was, straight and strong--yet he felt he could say for himself,
when once it had come, or even, already, just as it was coming, that it
turned on, as if she had moved an electric switch, the very brightest
light of his own very reasons. There _she_ was, in all the grossness
of her native indelicacy, in all her essential excess of will and
destitution of scruple; and it was the woman capable of that ignoble
threat who, his sharper sense of her quality having become so quite
deterrent, was now making for him a crime of it that he shouldn’t wish
to tie himself to her for life. The vivid, lurid thing was the reality,
all unmistakable, of her purpose; she had thought her case well out;
had measured its odious, specious presentability; had taken, he might
be sure, the very best advice obtainable at Properley, where there
was always a first-rate promptitude of everything fourth-rate; it was
disgustingly certain, in short, that she’d proceed. She was sharp
and adroit, moreover--distinctly in certain ways a master-hand; how
otherwise, with her so limited mere attractiveness, should she have
entangled him? He couldn’t shut his eyes to the very probable truth that
if she should try it she’d pull it off. She _knew_ she would--precisely;
and her assurance was thus the very proof of her cruelty. That she
had pretended she loved him was comparatively nothing; other women had
pretended it, and other women too had really done it; but that she had
pretended he could possibly have been right and safe and blest in
loving _her_, a creature of the kind who could sniff that squalor of the
law-court, of claimed damages and brazen lies and published kisses,
of love-letters read amid obscene guffaws, as a positive tonic to
resentment, as a high incentive to her course--this was what put him
so beautifully in the right It was what might signify in a woman all
through, he said to himself, the mere imagination of such machinery.
Truly what a devilish conception and what an appalling nature!
But there was no doubt, luckily, either, that he _could_ plant his feet
the firmer for his now intensified sense of these things. He was to
live, it appeared, abominably worried, he was to live consciously
rueful, he was to live perhaps even what a scoffing world would call
abjectly exposed; but at least he was to live saved. In spite of his
clutch of which steadying truth, however, and in spite of his declaring
to her, with many other angry protests and pleas, that the line of
conduct she announced was worthy of a vindictive barmaid, a lurking fear
in him, too deep to counsel mere defiance, made him appear to keep open
a little, till he could somehow turn round again, the door of possible
composition. He had scoffed at her claim, at her threat, at her thinking
she could hustle and bully him--“Such a way, my eye, to call back
to life a dead love!”--yet his instinct was ever, prudentially but
helplessly, for gaining time, even if time only more wofully to quake,
and he gained it now by not absolutely giving for his ultimatum that he
wouldn’t think of coming round. He didn’t in the smallest degree mean to
come round, but it was characteristic of him that he could for three
or four days breathe a little easier by having left her under the
impression that he perhaps might. At the same time he couldn’t not have
said--what had conduced to bring out, in retort, her own last word, the
word on which they had parted--“Do you mean to say you yourself would
now be _willing_ to marry and live with a man of whom you could feel,
the thing done, that he’d be all the while thinking of you in the light
of a hideous coercion?” “Never you mind about _my_ willingness,” Kate
had answered; “you’ve known what that has been for the last six months.
Leave that to me, my willingness--I’ll take care of it all right; and
just see what conclusion you can come to about your own.”
He was to remember afterward how he had wondered whether, turned upon
her in silence while her odious lucidity reigned unchecked, his face had
shown her anything like the quantity of hate he felt. Probably not at
all; no man’s face _could_ express that immense amount; especially the
fair, refined, intellectual, gentlemanlike face which had had--and by
her own more than once repeated avowal--so much to do with the enormous
fancy she had originally taken to him. “Which--frankly now--would you
personally _rather_ I should do,” he had at any rate asked her with an
intention of supreme irony: “just sordidly marry you on top of this, or
leave you the pleasure of your lovely appearance in court and of your so
assured (since that’s how you feel it) big haul of damages? Sha’n’t
you be awfully disappointed, in fact, if I don’t let you get something
better out of me than a poor plain ten-shilling gold ring and the rest
of the blasphemous rubbish, as we should make it between us, pronounced
at the altar? I take it of course,” he had swaggered on, “that your
pretension wouldn’t be for a moment that I should--after the act of
profanity--take up my life with you.”
“It’s just as much my dream as it ever was, Herbert Dodd, to take up
mine with _you!_ Remember for me that I can do with it, my dear, that my
idea is for even as much as that of you!” she had cried; “remember that
for me, Herbert Dodd; remember, remember!”
It was on this she had left him--left him frankly under a mortal chill.
There might have been the last ring of an appeal or a show of persistent
and perverse tenderness in it, however preposterous any such matter; but
in point of fact her large, clean, plain, brown face--so much too big
for her head, he now more than ever felt it to be, just as her head was
so much too big for her body, and just as her hats had an irritating way
of appearing to decline choice and conformity in respect to _any_ of her
dimensions--presented itself with about as much expression as his own
shop-window when the broad, blank, sallow blind was down. He was fond of
his shop-window with some good show on; he had a fancy for a good show
and was master of twenty different schemes of taking arrangement for the
old books and prints, “high-class rarities” his modest catalogue called
them, in which he dealt and which his maternal uncle, David Geddes, had,
as he liked to say, “handed down” to him. His widowed mother had screwed
the whole thing, the stock and the connection and the rather bad little
house in the rather bad little street, out of the ancient worthy,
shortly before his death, in the name of the youngest and most
interesting, the “delicate” one and the literary, of her five scattered
and struggling children. He could enjoy his happiest collocations and
contrasts and effects, his harmonies and varieties of toned and faded
leather and cloth, his sought color-notes and the high clearnesses,
here and there, of his white and beautifully figured price-labels, which
pleased him enough in themselves almost to console him for not
oftener having to break, on a customer’s insistence, into the balanced
composition. But the dropped expanse of time-soiled canvas, the thing
of Sundays and holidays, with just his name, “Herbert Dodd, Successor,”
painted on below his uncle’s antique style, the feeble penlike
flourishes already quite archaic--this ugly vacant mask, which might
so easily be taken for the mask of failure, somehow always gave him a
chill.
That had been just the sort of chill--the analogy was complete--of Kate
Cookham’s last look. He supposed people doing an awfully good and sure
and steady business, in whatever line, could see a whole front turned
to vacancy that way and merely think of the hours off represented by it.
Only for this--nervously to bear it, in other words, and Herbert Dodd,
quite with the literary temperament himself, was capable of that amount
of play of fancy, or even of morbid analysis--you had to be on some
footing, you had to feel some confidence, pretty different from his own
up to now. He had never _not_ enjoyed passing his show on the other side
of the street and taking it in thence with a casual obliquity; but he
had never held optical commerce with the drawn blind for a moment longer
than he could help. It _always_ looked horribly final and as if it never
would come up again. Big and bare, with his name staring at him from the
middle, it thus offered in its grimness a turn of comparison for Miss
Cookham’s ominous visage. She never wore pretty, dotty, transparent
veils, as Nan Drury did, and the words “Herbert Dodd”--save that she had
sounded them at him there two or three times more like a Meg Merrilies
or the bold bad woman in one of the melodramas of high life given during
the fine season in the pavilion at the end of Properley Pier--were
dreadfully, were permanently, seated on her lips. _She_ was grim, no
mistake.
That evening, alone in the back room above the shop, he saw so little
what he could do that, consciously demoralised for the hour, he gave way
to tears about it. Her taking a stand so incredibly “low,” that was
what he couldn’t get over. The particular bitterness of his cup was
his having let himself in for a struggle on such terms--the use, on
her side, of the vulgarest process known to the law: the vulgarest, the
vulgarest, he kept repeating that, clinging to the help rendered him by
this imputation to his terrorist of the vice he sincerely believed he
had ever, among difficulties (for oh he recognised the difficulties!)
sought to keep most alien to him. He knew what he was, in a dismal,
down-trodden sphere enough--the lean young proprietor of an old business
that had itself rather shrivelled with age than ever grown fat, the
purchase and sale of second-hand books and prints, with the back street
of a long-fronted south-coast watering-place (Old Town by good luck) for
the dusky field of his life. But he had gone in for all the education he
could get--his educated customers would often hang about for more talk
by the half-hour at a time, he actually feeling himself, and almost with
a scruple, hold them there; which meant that he had had (he couldn’t be
blind to that) natural taste and had lovingly cultivated and formed it.
Thus, from as far back as he could remember, there had been things all
round him that he suffered from when other people didn’t; and he had
kept most of his suffering to himself--which had taught him, in a
manner, _how_ to suffer, and how almost to like to.
So, at any rate, he had never let go his sense of certain differences,
he had done everything he could to keep it up--whereby everything that
was vulgar was on the wrong side of his line. He had believed, for a
series of strange, oppressed months, that Kate Cookham’s manners
and tone were on the right side; she had been governess--for young
children--in two very good private families, and now had classes in
literature and history for bigger girls who were sometimes brought by
their mammas; in fact, coming in one day to look over his collection of
students’ manuals, and drawing it out, as so many did, for the evident
sake of his conversation, she had appealed to him that very first time
by her apparently pronounced intellectual side--goodness knew she didn’t
even then by the physical!--which she had artfully kept in view till she
had entangled him past undoing. And it had all been but the cheapest of
traps--when he came to take the pieces apart a bit--laid over a brazen
avidity. What he now collapsed for, none the less--what he sank down on
a chair at a table and nursed his weak, scared sobs in his resting arms
for--was the fact that, whatever the trap, it held him as with the grip
of sharp murderous steel. There he was, there he was; alone in the brown
summer dusk--brown through _his_ windows--he cried and he cried. He
shouldn’t get out without losing a limb. The only question was which of
his limbs it should be.
Before he went out, later on--for he at last felt the need to--he could,
however, but seek to remove from his face and his betraying eyes, over
his washing-stand, the traces of his want of fortitude. He brushed
himself up; with which, catching his stricken image a bit spectrally
in an old dim toilet-glass, he knew again, in a flash, the glow of
righteous resentment. Who should be assured against coarse usage if
a man of his really elegant, perhaps in fact a trifle over-refined or
“effete” appearance, his absolutely gentlemanlike type, couldn’t be?
He never went so far as to rate himself, with exaggeration, a gentleman;
but he would have maintained against all comers, with perfect candour
and as claiming a high advantage, that he was, in spite of that
liability to blubber, “like” one; which he _was_ no doubt, for that
matter, at several points. Like what lady then, who could ever possibly
have been taken for one, was Kate Cookham, and therefore how could one
have anything--anything of the intimate and private order--out with her
fairly and on the plane, the only possible one, of common equality? He
might find himself crippled for life; he believed verily, the more he
thought, that that was what was before him. But be ended by seeing this
doom in the almost redeeming light of the fact that it would all have
been because he was, comparatively, too aristocratic. Yes, a man in his
station couldn’t afford to carry that so far--it must sooner or later,
in one way or another, spell ruin. Never mind--it was the only thing
he could be. Of course he should exquisitely suffer--but when hadn’t
he exquisitely suffered? How was he going to get through life by _any_
arrangement without that? No wonder such a woman as Kate Cookham had
been keen to annex so rare a value. The right thing would have been that
the highest price should be paid for it--by such a different sort of
logic from this nightmare of _his_ having to pay.