“The women to succeed in that have got to be aggressive, fight their
way like men. She never could do it.”
I again had no response and we fared on, I trying to keep up, hungry
for his next word and fearful of what it might be. It came in a voice
that had an artificial note of carelessness.
“What’s become of that man you told me about, that man we saw in the
hall one night when you first went up there?”
“I don’t know what’s become of him.”
“You haven’t seen him lately?”
“No, not for some weeks.”
There was another pause. I wasn’t going to help him. It was part of
my torment to wait and see how he was going to get the information he
wanted, to see Roger, uneasy and jealous, feeling round a subject, not
daring to be frank. When he could wait no longer his voice showed a
leashed and guarded impatience.
“You led me to believe he was a great friend of hers.”
“He _was_.”
“_Was?_ Is he so no longer?”
“No, they’ve had a quarrel of some sort.”
“Umph.”
Again a silence. We passed a trio of Jewish girls in long coats who
looked me over solemnly with large languorous eyes.
“He was a horrible-looking bounder,” he said.
“He was what he looked,” I answered.
“Then how,” he exclaimed, unable to restrain the question, “_could_ he
have been a friend of hers?”
He was embarrassed and ashamed, and to hide it cut vigorously at the
dead weeds with his cane. Through this childish ruse his desire to know
was as plain as if he had expressed it in words of one syllable.
“He was her sponsor. She was a sort of speculation of his; he was
training her for the operatic stage. I’ve told you all this before.”
“Yes, I know, but--well, it’s a reasonable explanation.”
He had been speaking with his face turned from me, his eyes following
the slashings of the cane. Now he lifted his head and looked across to
the apartment-houses. The movement, the brightened expression, the tone
of his voice, told of a lifted weight. He had heard it all before, but
then he hadn’t cared. Now, caring, he wanted to hear it again, to be
assured, to have all uncertainty appeased.
“It was a business arrangement,” he said. “Yes, I remember, you told me
some time ago.”
This time I didn’t answer because a thought had surged up in my mind
that had put everything else out--I ought to tell him! He was under
Lizzie’s spell and Lizzie was as unknown to him as if she had been an
inhabitant of Mars. He was charmed by a creature of his own creating,
an ideal built up on her beauty and her weakness. Did he know her as
she really was he would have recoiled from her as if she had been
one of the sirens from whom Ulysses fled. She was the opposite of
everything he imagined her to be, of everything he held sacred in
woman. John Masters had been her lover. It was appalling, monstrous. I
_must_ tell him.
And then I thought of her and how she had confessed her secret and I
had said I wouldn’t tell.
The impulse to reveal it for his sake and the impulse to keep silent
for hers, began to struggle in me. I became a battle-ground of two
contending forces. The desire to tell was strongest; it was like a live
thing fighting to get out. It filled me, crushed every other thought
and impulse, swelled up through my throat and pressed on my lips. I
bit them and walked on with fixed eyes. As if from a distance I heard
Roger’s voice:
“From what you said he must be an impossible cad. I knew she couldn’t
have had him for a friend. Poor girl, having to associate with a man
like that because business demanded it. What a rotten existence.”