Tod’s wife found Mr. Maurice Goldstein sitting in a revolving chair in
front of a rolled-top desk. She had been kept waiting in the outer
office for half an hour before Mr. Goldstein troubled to see her, and he
did not look up when the clerk showed her into his private room.
Maurice Goldstein was writing a letter.
“Excuse me a moment.”
The politeness was purely perfunctory. He sat at the desk like a
gourmand absorbed in a meal, his chin thrust forward with a queer
suggestion of truculence, the penholder looking lost in his fat white
hand. Millie, the woman, collected her impressions. The man was
prematurely bald, a ring of curly black hair running like a wreath round
an egg-shaped head. His neck was the neck of middle age, with an
incipient overflow where it met his collar. He wore white spats, and his
thighs and buttocks were huge. Millie had only a partial view of his
face, a glimpse of thick pouting lips between the full curve of nose and
chin.
He was deliberate. The letter was put into an envelope, addressed, and
the pen laid on its brass holder before his fat thighs swung round in
the pedestal chair. He had begun to speak while the chair was still
swinging and before he had seen Millie’s face.
“What is it you want? I’ve got an appointment in ten minutes.”
And then his sensual brown eyes seemed to set in a surprised stare.
Millie, the woman, smiled at him.
“I’m sorry to trouble you, Mr. Goldstein, but I have come to see you for
my husband.”
The Jew looked and said nothing. The sex in her was flowing into him
like wine.
“My husband is ill with influenza. He owes you a cheque or something. I
don’t know anything about money; and he was worrying, so I said I would
come and see you.”
Mr. Goldstein’s eyes filled suddenly with an amused, brown light.
“So many people owe me money, but it is not often, madam, that I see
their wives.”
“Do they? How jolly to be owed money.”
He made a fat movement of his chin.
“And not to get it—what!”
“Oh, you get it all right,” she said audaciously.
The Jew was pleased.
“My husband’s too easy, you know,” she went on with confidential
friendliness. “I know you helped to start him, but he wants a few
straight talks from a man who can make money. I’ve tried——”
He was rubbing one big fist in the palm of his other hand.
“And you said you knew nothing.”
“Did I?” and she laughed. “Anyhow, I do the economising. No, I don’t
like it.”
“You wouldn’t,” he said with an insolent and intimate gleam of the eyes.
He sat there and basked while she told him of Tod’s difficulties. In
fact, Tod cut a sorry figure in Maurice Goldstein’s office, having all
his money assets exposed to the cynical eyes of the Jew, and his moral
parts figured and discussed by a young woman who did not know the
meaning of the word loyalty. Goldstein was amused, more than amused. He
was astride of a great advantage, and he made the most of his mount.
“Excuse me. I’ll look up the transaction.”
He did not ring for a clerk, but turned up “Western’s Garage” in a
private ledger of his own. The figures seemed to amuse him, for Millie
saw him smiling over the book.
“You come from Shaston-on-Sea, Mrs. Western. I happen to be interested
in Shaston.”
“Oh?” said Millie. “How?”
Goldstein pulled out his watch.
“Lunching anywhere?” he asked curtly.
“Somewhere, by myself.”
“I’d like the honour of giving you lunch.”
“What about that appointment?”
His brown eyes held hers.
“It’s off. Will you come?”
“It’s very nice of you, Mr. Goldstein, but I——”
“Please yourself,” he said, with a sensual smile and a bluntness that
she understood. “I want to have a talk about Shaston and your husband’s
business.”
“I really am rather hungry,” she allowed, looking up at him under
mischievous lashes.
He rang the bell.
“Smith, get a taxi. I shan’t be back till three.”
Tod’s wife returned to Shaston like a cat that has been lapping cream.
It appeared that Maurice Goldstein was interested financially in the new
Regent’s Hotel that was to be opened on the seafront. It was a very big
hotel, one among half a dozen that were being floated by a syndicate in
various south coast towns. Goldstein had his big hands in the business;
he had his big hands in many businesses, and the smell of his money had
entered Millie’ nostrils. He was the sort of powerful and cynically
sensual man who can be very attractive to a sensual woman. The Assyrian
bull in him was more than symbolical.
Tod was eating an orange when his wife opened the bedroom door. He
looked gaunt and grey in the gaslight; his head an untidy mop, his chin
all brown stubble. And, somehow, he looked poor.
“I settled it,” she began, vaguely patronising. “Goldstein’s not a bad
sort. He won’t press you.”
Tod’s big eyes filled with relief.
“That’s good. I’ve been lying here all day, worrying my head off. How
did you manage it?”
“Just common sense. Besides, you old silly, it’s the first time you have
been late with the money, and Goldstein’s out to back you, and not smash
you up. It’s just common sense.”
She did not tell Tod that she had lunched with Goldstein, or that the
man was interested in the new Regent’s Hotel. It was no business of
Tod’s to know that Goldstein was coming down to stay at Shaston. Millie
foresaw possibilities in the situation, a chance of dabbling with her
own hands in financial experiments. She knew that men could be very
useful, but Tod was too touchy a fool to be told about such diplomacies.
She fancied she knew how to manipulate Maurice Goldstein.
Of that very sinister period in Tod’s life there is little that is worth
the telling. Its culminating incident collected the whole glare of the
affair’s significance. Some three months passed, and in spite of all his
efforts Tod still owed the Semite of Wardour Street some sixty pounds,
but the summer season was at hand, and Tod forecasted a new briskness in
the business. He had not been swamped by any more unexpected bills, and
Millie appeared to be spending less money. She had developed a new
penchant for going up to town once a week and buying her groceries and
household necessaries at the Stores, and Tod had nothing to say against
it, since she could prove that it saved money. Also, she seemed more
contented, more satisfied with something.
Early in May Tod went North to take the delivery of a client’s new car
at the Sangster Company’s works, and to drive it down to Shaston. He
told Millie that he expected to be away for two nights, as the new car
was rather an expensive production, and he had no intention of pushing
her through a speed trial on the way down. He meant to stay a night in
the North, and break the journey somewhere near Oxford. Millie said that
she envied him the drive, gave him a packet of sandwiches to put in his
little black handbag, and then darted out and sent a telegram.
The Regent’s Hotel had just opened for the summer season, and she dined
there that night with Maurice Goldstein. The Jew had a big car with him,
and after dinner they went out in the car, Goldstein driving himself,
and they got lost in the lanes among the Bramber woods. The lights were
out when they drove back to Shaston.
Now if Tod had kept to his programme, and not bustled the new “Sangster”
southwards on the afternoon of his arrival, he might have remained the
blind man in the home for months to come. “You can take her away at
once,” said the works manager, “she’s O.K., and won’t want touching for
a hundred miles.” So Tod took her away, knocked a hundred and fifty
miles off the journey before putting up for the night, and at five
o’clock next afternoon he was within ten miles of Shaston and speeding
along the London road with the woods all green under a clean, spring
sky.
“Wonder if she’d do Furnace Hill on second?” thought Tod.
The experiment challenged him. He swung the car to the left at the next
lane, and saw an A. A. scout peddling up the hill, looking very hot and
thirsty.
The man got off his machine and signalled to Tod to stop.
“Not going Shaston way are you, sir?”
“I am,” said Tod.
“I just got a message from a boy that there’s a car broke down the other
side of Furnace Hill. I’m going to ’phone up a garage.”
“I’m your man,” said Tod. “I’m Western of Western’s Garage. I’m going
round by Furnace Hill, and I can stop and see what’s wrong.”
“Then I can leave it to you,” said the scout; “I want my tea. Get it at
Lamb’s Corner.”
Tod drove blindly towards his disillusionment. The new car soared up
Furnace Hill on second speed, and Tod let her “free wheel” down the
opposite slope, delighting in the noiseless glide of her and the taut
silence of her youth. Furnace Hill had formed part of the old forest,
yet had remained a wilderness of gorse, broom, bracken and brambles,
with thickets of Scots fir and groves of straggling oaks. Tod knew it
well, and by the bend where a famous old yew sent its black plumes up
into the blue Tod came upon a yellow car standing derelict at the side
of the road. Tod’s car had come coasting silently round the corner. He
pulled up, got out, and looked about for some sign of the owner of the
yellow car.
Then he heard voices, and a woman’s laugh—a laugh that ended in an
ecstatic and giggling scream. There was a little wood here, full of
bluebells and surrounded by masses of yellow broom. Tod pushed through a
gap in the brushwood, and came upon a grassy space, a smooth trickle of
green that lost itself like water in the shadows of the wood. He saw a
girl and a man here. The man was bending over the girl, kissing her
throat with a sort of savage violence. Her bright hair and face were
visible above his dark and gluttonous head, and her eyes were closed
like the eyes of a dreaming, sensual cat. Her arms were round the man’s
neck.
And Tod recognised his wife.
He remembered making some sort of noise in his throat. He remembered the
two figures disentangling themselves, the man getting up clumsily on his
hands and knees, and turning a savage and sheepish jowl. The woman sat
up, dead white, patting her hair with her hands, and staring at nothing
with expressionless blue eyes.
Tod recognised Maurice Goldstein.
“What do you mean by kissing my wife?”
Even in the thick of his anger he felt the paltriness of it all, the
sordid smear on the face of his wrath.
The man grinned. He looked yellow, but there was a savage tawniness in
his eyes.
“Because she asked me to.”
“You cad!” said Tod.
He felt that nothing mattered—nothing but the necessity for hammering
this bulk of blackguardism with his fists. And hammer him he did, though
Goldstein made a fight of it with a heavy, blundering ferocity that
panted and got out of breath. Tod smashed him in the face till the white
bulge of it was all blood, and his big mouth a dripping thing full of
teeth and redness.
Tod’s wife stood and watched, pulling at her lower lip with her
forefinger, her nostrils quivering. There was something in Tod’s eyes
that fascinated her, a blue glare, a quick, calculating fury. She heard
the smashes he landed on the other man’s face.
Goldstein went down, dazed, his teeth showing in a bloody, snarling
grin.
Tod’s wife fawned suddenly upon her man.
“Oh, Tod, you licked him.”
Tod just turned his head slightly, and gave her an oblique stare.
“Come on,” he said, “come on, damn you!”
She followed him with extraordinary meekness, but loitered a moment by
the yellow car.
“My coat’s in here.”
She reached for a fur coat, but Tod’s eyes had become the merciless eyes
of a man who had been shocked out of all illusions.
“Leave that alone. I didn’t give it you.”
She left it alone, and, following him into the other car, sat staring
stiffly in front of her.
Tod drove down the hill, that blue glare still in his eyes, and
Goldstein’s blood showing on his knuckles. He felt that he had come to
the end of the world, that all the conscious pride had gone out of his
life, and that there was nothing left to him now that he had thrashed
the man who had debauched his wife. He had trusted her, and the reaction
was all the more fierce.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked her suddenly.
He was the master for the moment, and there was a whimpering note in her
voice.
“Oh, Tod, don’t be so horrid! I couldn’t help it. He took me by
surprise.”
“How?”
“I’d been out with him in the car, and we had a breakdown, and we were
just waiting for help. He seemed to go mad suddenly just before you
came.”
Tod did not believe her.
“Did he give you that fur coat?”
“He made me take it. I didn’t want to offend him.”
“But what were you with him for at all? It can’t have been the first
time.”
“How beastly you are! I was trying to help you and the business. He’s
got such influence. Don’t you see?”
“Good God!”
His nausea was complete. Her moral obliquity, the coarse cynicism of her
confession shocked the very deeps of his manhood. And he did not believe
her. He could not forget that look of sensual rapture he had seen upon
her face.
“Well, that’s the end of it,” he said.
“What d’you mean?”
“I have got to pay that blackguard what I owe him. I shall sell things
and give up the house. I don’t see that the business is much use—now.”
She said nothing. Tod’s face convinced her that there was nothing to be
said. But she began to hate him again, this inopportune, straightforward
fool who had blundered in and spoilt the cunning of her intrigue. She
would have looked at it as a “bit of fun,” fooling two men and getting
what she wanted. Lots of women did it.
She told him so, and he flashed round at her with sudden fury.
“Shut up—damn you! You don’t understand.”
He drove with cool recklessness into Shaston, and pulled up at the end
of Duke Street.
“You’d better go—back to the house.”
He had refused to say “home,” and she noticed it.
“All right. Are you coming?”
He drove on as though he had not heard her.