Tod breakfasted alone. Millie had shirked meeting the expected challenge
of his face, and she took her meal in bed, and waited for the sound of
Tod’s going.
Habit kept him to the clock. He walked down to Duke Street, smoking his
favourite bull-dog pipe, and thinking over the things that he had to do.
Goldstein would have to be paid at once, some of the furniture sold, and
a prospective tenant found for “Carnarvon.” Tod was still in doubt about
the business, whether he should go on fighting, and trust to the summer
season to pull it through. Kitty’s eyes seemed to be watching him, and
he remembered that he had posed as the strong friend, and had urged her
to make a fight for it, while he—Tod—thought over the possibilities.
He could not tell a girl to make a fight of it, and then back down
himself.
Tod found a letter waiting for him from Newton and Smythe. Love handed
it to him with his usually dirty hand.
“A boy brought it.”
Tod was asked to see Mr. Newton at twelve o’clock. The senior partner
was engaged at eleven.
Then the owner of the new car called, a middle-aged person who was as
excited as a boy.
“She’s smart, Western, isn’t she? Nice lines, what? And she’s fast, I
suppose?”
“Climbed Furnace Hill on second,” said Tod, wearily.
“Some car! Let’s have a look at the engine. I want to take her out and
try her.”
It was a quarter to twelve when Tod walked down Duke Street on his way
to the office of Newton and Smythe. By the clock tower where Duke Street
met King William Street and Marlborough Crescent, Tod’s path crossed
that of a newsboy who was selling the early edition of a local paper.
“Lady drowned at Shaston,” shouted the boy.
Tod stopped with a jerk.
“Paper.”
“Right, sir.”
He stopped by the clock tower and read the news of Kitty’s death.
“We regret to announce that the body of Mrs. Kitty Rook was found in the
sea this morning near the White Cliff. Mrs. Rook was the younger
daughter of our well-known townsman Mr. Eli Flowerdew,” &c.
* * * * *
Tod was shocked, shocked to the deeps. So she had drowned herself after
all, poor, wounded, broken Kitty, even as her mother had drowned herself
fifteen years ago?
“There’s nothing else to do, Tod.”
Was she right?
Tod had a lump in his throat and the wandering steps of a man who saw
nothing for the moment. The driver of one of Mr. Pumpelly’s new
motor-buses swung the steering-wheel round and bawled at him.
“’Ere, wake up! Are you going to market?”
“Sorry,” said Tod.
“With blokes like you about a man’s life ain’t worth livin’.”
Tod laughed with laughter that was near to tears.
But somehow Kitty’s death had shocked the last remnants of commercial
vanity out of him. What a sorry game it was, a scramble with men like
Flowerdew and Edwin Rook, that fat old cynic Pumpelly, and such
money-beasts as Goldstein! There were some men who played the game
cleanly, but there were others who would foul you whenever they could do
it safely or with advantage, and Tod had an idea that the men who fouled
were the men who won. How was it that he had let himself be drawn into
this little back-street, swindling business, when he might have been
soldiering or sailoring or out in the wilds somewhere, living like a
man? Mr. Burgetrode was right, damnably right. He remembered his
father’s saying about people with penny-three-farthing souls.
So Tod walked into the office of Newton and Smythe, and presented a new
and steel-bright decision to a phlegmatic old solicitor whose creed in
life was compromise.
“I want to get out of this business and pay everybody, and I want to get
out of it at once,” said Tod, “and I want to pay this chap Goldstein
to-day.”
Mr. Sobersides tried to smooth Tod down.
“There is no need to do anything rash, Mr. Western.”
“I’m not doing anything rash,” said Tod; “I’m only having a wash and
getting rid of my dirty clothes. The furniture in my house is all paid
for; so is one of the taxis. Can’t you raise money on that?”
“Certainly, when the security has been looked into. Am I to understand
that you want us to act between you and this Goldstein, to wind up the
business, settle with all your creditors, and reserve as much of your
capital as we can?”
“I want everybody paid,” said Tod, “and the thing done cleanly. There
might be a clear hundred or two left over, but I’m not counting on
anything.”
Mr. Newton scratched his chin with the end of a pen.
“Look here, my young friend,” he said; “let me advise you to hold your
tongue for a week and say nothing about selling. Leave it to us. The
business is a going concern, and we can sell it as such. You can let us
have your books?”
“Of course.”
“And perhaps you would like us to hold the matter up for a day or two
while you think it over?”
“If I thought it over for ten years,” said Tod, “it wouldn’t make any
difference. It’s a question of conscience.”
Old Mr. Newton thought Tod an excitable and rather overinflated young
man, but there appeared to be a woman in the case, though Tod had said
very little about his wife.
“So you will let me have your books, Mr. Western, and all outstanding
accounts, and your pass-book, and the copy of any agreement with this
Mr. Goldstein?”
“You shall have them to-night,” said Tod.
He walked out of Mr. Newton’s office, feeling that he had flung
something off his shoulders and that the day was the better for it. He
wanted to be conscious of nothing but Kitty, Kitty who in her anguish
had refused to accept any compromise and who had carried her secret with
her to the sea. There was only one street in Shaston for Tod that
morning, the street where she had lived and where he had parted with her
only a few hours ago, and he walked down it, and saw the drawn blinds of
the house and a few people gaping at it with vulgar curiosity.
Tod stood a moment against the railings of the house opposite, and
wondered what Edwin Rook thought of his wife’s death. He felt that he
wanted to get Rook by the collar, and drag him into the most crowded
street of Shaston and thrash him as he deserved to be thrashed. And then
someone bumped against Tod, a silly old woman with a vacant face and a
claw-like hand clutching a bag.
“Beg pardon. She’s in there, isn’t she?”
“Who?” Tod asked.
“Why, the woman who drowned herself. Suppose she’d got into some sort of
trouble.”
Tod froze. The old woman was looking at the drawn blinds and smiling as
though death and life were a mere circus procession.
“They say she had all her clothes on, so it must have been sooicide.”
“You old beast,” said Tod and walked on.
But in spite of his anger, his heart was softened, and any thought of
dramatic and physical interference melted out of his mind. Kitty lay
asleep somewhere in that house, the long sleep that even the hands of
silly old women could not jeopardise. She was beyond all recriminations,
humiliations, anguish, shame. She had kept her secret, and if there were
a merciful God, Tod knew that God held her soul, and that these people
who had killed her would have to answer for it to Him. And Tod told
himself that he would hold her secret sacred. It was too tragic and
poignant a thing to be brawled over and advertised by using the toe of a
boot. What was the use of telling Rook and the Flowerdews that they were
swine? If Kitty’s death had not made them realise it, no human words
would ever do so.
Tod walked on along the beach to where the old black boat lay half
buried in shingle under the White Cliff. He sat down there just where he
and Kitty had sat the night before, and the sun shone on him full and
clear. It was an exquisite May day, a soft turquoise sky and a calm
grey-blue sea, with just the gentlest swish of little waves along the
shingle; and the fishing fleet was out, the brown sails dark on the
horizon. Far out an old tramp steamer trailed a plume of black smoke, an
old blackguard of a boat contentedly smoking its pipe.
Tod sat there in the sun, and suffered this tragedy of a girl’s life to
turn the edge of his own bitterness. Dead Kitty seemed to plead with him
for that other woman, and Tod’s heart was softened towards his wife.
“I married her,” he said to himself, “and perhaps I have been to blame.
People are made differently and want different things. I’m responsible
for her in a way. It’s no use making a worse mess of it, and being mean;
we have got to try and make a fresh start and be patient with each
other.”
In some such mood as this he returned to “Carnarvon,” where the little
red may tree and the two laburnums were in bloom. There were buds on the
standard roses, and Ginger the sandy cat was asleep in the sun on the
drawing-room window-sill. Tod realised “Carnarvon” as he had never
realised it before; it was a little chocolate-box of a home, the house
of a woman whose ideals were all wrong.
“It’s got to go,” said Tod; “we’ll start differently next time.”
He found Millie in the drawing-room, sewing aimlessly at some
superfluous bit of finery. She gave him a momentary and sulky stare of
her blue eyes, and Tod saw that she was afraid.
“Sorry I have been away so long. I had a lot to do.”
She gave him a second glance, a look of surprise. She had been puzzled
by the unexpectedness of Tod, and she liked men to be obvious.
“Don’t apologise, please.”
He sat down, and sat down with an air of a man who was in no hurry, a
man who had made himself master of the situation. His bull-dog pipe came
out. He filled it, lit the tobacco, and puffed with obvious enjoyment.
“I want to talk to you, Millie.”
She bent her head over her work, and remained in that attitude during
all the time that he was speaking.
And Tod was gentle, extraordinarily gentle.
“We seem to have got adrift, somehow,” he told her, “and I want to make
a new beginning. I don’t think that we have understood each other, or
made allowances for each other. I want to get away from the money idea,
the idea that money and show matter more than anything else in the
world.”
She remained with bent head, saying nothing, astonished by his
gentleness, waiting to hear what he had to offer her in the way of life
and a home.
“We shall have to leave this house and sell most of the furniture, and
the business will have to go too. I have put everything in the hands of
Newton and Smythe. We’ll take rooms and live quietly and I’ll get a job
somewhere; I might even go back to the Craggs.”
Her silence betrayed nothing.
“We shall have to face it, Millie, and the only thing is to try and face
it like pals. We’ve drifted apart these last months, and all sorts of
things happen when people drift apart. I’m thinking how happy we were
three years ago.”
“Three years is a long time,” she said.
And she despised him for his gentleness. If he had thrashed her as he
had thrashed that Jew, he would have regained all his physical
ascendancy, and she would have been his woman. Spiritual fineness had no
meaning for Tod’s wife.