Tod drove the new car into his garage and switched off the engine, and
when the steel heart of the machine ceased to beat, something in Tod
gave up also. He felt tired, unstrung, yet curiously callous. He mooned
vacantly about the place for five minutes, like a man on the edge of
some great sickness, and then habit caught him and sent him into the
little office to see if there were any letters.
He was opening an envelope when he noticed Maurice Goldstein’s blood on
his hands.
“Filth!”
Strangely nauseated, he went out and shouted to Love, who was changing a
burst tyre on one of the taxis.
“Get me a bucket of water and some soap, will you?”
He stood there and washed, and the act of washing touched some live
memory in him, a memory of his father’s bloody knuckles and all the
passionate idealism of his own childhood. He remembered his mother and
the white flame of her scorn and her anger, and how that other
blackguard had been thrashed and paid. A sudden surge of emotion rose in
Tod’s throat. He straightened and stood wiping his clenched hands on his
handkerchief, realising this money-shop of his and the things that it
had made him suffer. He seemed to see everywhere the fat white face of
that Jew, the face he had punched into a bloody pulp. The white cans of
oil on the shelf had the colour of it; the greasy smears on the floor
were like the slimy marks of a beast’s track.
“Good God!” said Tod; “it’s his, it belongs to him. I wouldn’t touch it
again.”
He turned to Love.
“Here, you can leave that tyre; I want to lock up.”
Love scratched his nose with a black thumb.
“Jim’s out, at the station. And there’s a theatre to do at eight.”
“All right. That can finish the day.”
He walked back into the office and wrote a letter to the owner of the
new car. He wrote also to a firm of solicitors in Shaston, Newton and
Smythe, and asked for an appointment with the senior partner at eleven
o’clock next morning. Later, he locked up the shop, posted the letters
at the general office, and loitered a moment as though undecided where
to go.
Some impulse sent him wandering into old Shaston, the Shaston of his
early days, the Shaston of the Flowerdews and of Kitty of the soft eyes.
And Tod wandered and dreamed. He knew that something tragic had happened
to his life, that all the little strivings and ambitions of the last
three years had left him at the crossroads, with a stick and a bundle in
his hand. “Carnarvon” had come tumbling down like a child’s house of
bricks. “Giggles,” the little minx of Pentworth, had proved herself the
mother of the woman.
Tod’s mind was like a room hung with many pictures—memories; memories
that were so vivid and so significant that he marvelled at his own
blindness. Had not his mother said to him: “Tod, never marry until you
have been in love ten times.” Yet what a wonderful comradeship it had
been, that marriage of his mother and his father, and Tod’s heart
yearned that night towards the memory of those parents who were dead. If
only his mother had been alive, if he could have talked to her, put his
head on her knees! Yes, he felt like that.
And Mr. Burgetrode! Mr. Burgetrode had told him the truth. What had he
got out of marriage, anyway? It had made a money slave of him, tempted
him to do mean and cowardly things, and ended by mocking the elemental
pride of his manhood. His woman had——! But Tod fought the vile
thoughts off and thrust them aside, realising even in the depths of his
disillusionment, that foul thoughts make a man cruel and a coward. He
did not mean to be either cruel or a coward, even if life had proved him
a fool.
Tod wandered down Ponsonby Place, looking up at Mr. Eli Flowerdew’s name
on the familiar shop. He found himself wondering whether he would have
been happy with Kitty, and some boyish instinct cried out that she would
have loved him as his mother had loved his father. Memories, memories;
they were big and heavy in this throat! Dusk was falling, and he saw the
White Cliff, like a great grey ghost watching over the black fishing
boats and the sea. Bob Twine had taught him to swim down yonder, and
under the White Cliff he had spoken his last words to Kitty Flowerdew.
Tod crunched along the shingle towards the blue hollow of the night,
past the black fishing boats, till there was nothing but the lonely
sweep of the beach and the swish of the sea. An old hull lay derelict
here with shingle banked high about its black rump, and Tod sat down
with his back to the boat and watched the tide come in. It was very dark
now, and darkness lay upon the waters, but a stealthy sheen of silver in
the east told him the moon was rising.
He did not want to go back to that house; he did not want to move; he
felt he could sit there all night. It was clean and beautiful and still,
and Shaston seemed far away. Good God! how he hated the place, how he
hated everything save the quiet sea and the rising moon. What beasts
people were! And then he thought again of his mother and little Kitty
Flowerdew. No, there were good people in the world, and Tod’s sturdiness
stiffened its back. He had got to make a fresh start, somehow, get out
of that doll’s-house. And Millie——? He felt a great loathing and a
great pity for his wife.
Tod had dreamed there for an hour, and the moon was a great white shield
over the sea, when he heard someone walking on the shingle. The
footsteps came his way; slow, heedless footsteps that seemed to take no
account of distance or of time. Tod looked up and saw the black shape of
a girl. Her face was turned towards the sea, and there was something
poignantly familiar to him in the slim shape of her, the slight droop of
her head, and the curve of her throat. She stood there a moment, a
figure of indescribable hopelessness and desolation, not seeing the man
sitting with his back against the boat, conscious of nothing but herself
and the sea.
“Oh, Mother, Mother!”
Tod heard the words quite distinctly, and the voice was the voice of
Kitty Flowerdew. She seemed to hesitate a moment, and Tod’s heart seemed
to stand still. It was Edwin Rook’s wife, Kitty of the soft eyes,
following in the footsteps of her mother, that mother who had drowned
herself on Shaston beach.
Suddenly, he saw her unpin her hat, drop it on the shingle, and walk
towards the soft swish of the incoming tide. Tod was up instantly, the
moonlight in his face.
“Kitty!”
She stopped dead and stood in an anguish of terror and helplessness, but
she did not turn to see who had called her by name. She heard Tod’s
footsteps on the shingle, and shivered like a woman who has borne a
child and is weak and cold with pain.
“Kitty. It’s Tod.”
She drooped, and suddenly began to weep, and Tod stood there, greatly
shocked, and wanting to hold her hand. The bitterness of his own tragedy
lost itself in her tears.
“Kitty, what’s the matter, dear?”
She wept unrestrainedly and with the frank anguish of a child.
“Oh—don’t—please—Tod.”
He remembered so well that little, helpless cry of hers. He had taken
her hand.
“Come and sit down, dear. It’s so quiet and peaceful.”
She let him take her to the old boat, and they sat down in its shadow,
Tod deep in the waters of pity, the girl still weeping out her heart.
“I want to drown myself—oh—I want to drown myself,” she said, with an
anguish that was naked and unconcealed.
Tod’s upper lip quivered.
“Tell me all about it—dear. I came here because I was miserable, and
you came here too.”
“I can’t bear it,” she said, “I can’t bear it any longer. Let me drown
myself, Tod—dear Tod. I’m only in the way.”
Tod felt torn between a sense of his own helplessness and a fierce
desire to go and smash somebody, the man who had been a brute to this
child.
“You mustn’t, dear. Try and talk to me. I’ve been very unhappy, Kitty.
It ought to make us friends.”
“I can’t talk about it,” she said brokenly; “they want me out of the
way.”
“Who are ‘they’?” Tod asked very gently.
“Edwin—and——”
“Don’t tell me if it hurts too much.”
“And—my sister.”
“Good God!” said Tod.
A second sex horror thrust itself upon him, a horror that was more
brutal than the tragedy of his own marriage. So Rook had tired of this
dark-eyed child, and found that vixen of a sister ready to intrigue with
him? Lena Flowerdew had always been jealous of Kitty, and Tod had
fancied that she had wanted Edwin Rook, but how had it happened, how
could two people have been so devilishly callous?
He did not know what to say to Kitty. There seemed nothing to be said.
“Are you sure, dear?” he asked her.
She caught her breath and shuddered.
“Yes, I saw them. Oh, I can’t talk about it! And Edwin hates me now; he
thinks me a fool, and he was angry when baby died. He was only
angry—but it broke my heart.”
“Poor Kitty!” said Tod, putting an arm round her.
She whimpered again, for she had been a lonely and frightened little
woman with no one to talk to.
“Of course he ought to have married Lena. Lena always wanted him, and
hated me because he wanted me then. She’s more suited to him; she’s
hard, and thinks of nothing but business and money; and she wouldn’t be
afraid of him.”
Tod’s teeth came together. So she was afraid of Rook; he bullied her. It
seemed like torturing a caged bird.
“I don’t understand,” he said; “I couldn’t understand anybody being
rough to you, Kitty. What’s to be done?”
“There’s nothing to be done,” she answered, with tragic simplicity. “I
ought to do what Mother did. If baby had lived I might have borne it,
but now——”
She broke down again, and Tod sat and stared fiercely at the sea.
“Have you told your father?”
“He wouldn’t believe me, and Lena’s his favourite.”
“Haven’t you any friends, dear?”
“Not real friends. I couldn’t talk to anybody as I’ve talked to you.”
He lifted one of her hands and kissed it.
“That’s the finest thing I have ever had said to me, Kitty. Well, I’m
going to be your friend, and you can always trust me, dear. I’ll think
it all over. Now I want you to let me take you home.”
“Oh, Tod, I can’t!”
“But, dear, try and bear it till something can be done. You know, I used
to be in love with you; I wanted to marry you.”
“I wish I had married you, Tod,” she said; “you wouldn’t have been
cruel.”
He tried to talk to her calmly and sensibly, and to make her realise
that he was in utter earnest when he said he meant to be her friend, and
so broken was she in spirit that she obeyed him with a meekness that
touched his heart. He led her back to Shaston along the shingle, trying
to speak to her as he thought his own mother would have spoken. He felt
her flinch when they reached the street in which she lived, but she went
on, and then paused a little way from the house.
“Don’t come any farther, Tod.”
“I must see you again, Kitty. I’ll walk out there every night till you
come.”
“Dear Tod,” she said, and slipped away in the darkness.
Tod walked home with the soul of him purged and strengthened. There was
no light in “Carnarvon,” and Tod let himself in silently, lit the gas in
the hall, and looked into the empty rooms. Millie had gone to her
bedroom; Tod could hear her moving about in the room above, and the
thought of her nearness and of her share in his life brought back the
vivid presence of his own problem. Kitty Rook’s misery had softened him,
but he felt that he could not go near his own wife. The physical man in
him rebelled.
But he went up and knocked at Millie’s door.
“Yes?” said her voice, toneless and sulky; “the door’s locked.”
“Good night,” Tod said mechanically.
He improvised himself a bed in the little spare room, and lay awake
thinking of the future. Poor Kitty’s tragedy outbid his own. She was so
helpless, so humiliated, so much the child hungry for affection, and Tod
wondered what he could do to help her.
But his chivalry was a thing of the air, a dream that was to die with
the news of the morning.
Kitty Rook had drowned herself, and in spite of Tod. Some fresh impulse
of despair had seized her after he had left her and when the comfort of
his comradeship had been withdrawn. She had gone back to the beach, and
some boys who were bathing found her body floating next morning under
the White Cliff.