The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903)/The Papers/Chapter 9
IX
If she kept to herself, from the morrow on, for three days, her adoption of that course was helped, as she thankfully felt, by the great other circumstance and the great public commotion under cover of which it so little mattered what became of private persons. It was not simply that she had her reasons, but she couldn't during this time have descended again to Fleet Street even had she wished, though she said to herself often enough that her behaviour was rank cowardice. She left her friend alone with what he had to face, since, as she found, she could in absence from him a little recover herself. In his presence, the night of the news, she knew she had gone to pieces, had yielded, all too vulgarly, to a weakness proscribed by her original view. Her original view had been that if poor Beadel, worked up, as she inveterately kept seeing him, should embrace the tragic remedy, Howard Bight wouldn't be able not to show as practically compromised. He wouldn't be able not to smell of the wretched man's blood, morally speaking, too strongly for condonations or complacencies. There were other things, truly, that, during their minutes on the Embankment, he had been able to do, but they constituted just the sinister subtlety to which it was well that she should not again, yet awhile, be exposed. They were of the order—from the safe summit of Maida Hill she could make it out—that had proved corrosive to the muddled mind of the Frankfort fugitive, deprived, in the midst of them, of any honest issue. Bight, of course, rare youth, had meant no harm; but what was precisely queerer, what, when you came to judge, less human, than to be formed for offence, for injury, by the mere inherent play of the spirit of observation, of criticism, by the inextinguishable flame, in fine, of the ironic passion? The ironic passion, in such a world as surrounded one, might assert itself as half the dignity, the decency, of life; yet, none the less, in cases where one had seen it prove gruesomely fatal (and not to one's self, which was nothing, but to others, even the stupid and the vulgar) one was plainly admonished to—well, stand off a little and think.
This was what Maud Blandy, while the Papers roared and resounded more than ever with the new meat flung to them, tried to consider that she was doing; so that the attitude held her fast during the freshness of the event. The event grew, as she had felt it would, with every further fact from Frankfort and with every extra-special, and reached its maximum, inevitably, in the light of comment and correspondence. These features, before the catastrophe, had indubitably, at the last, flagged a little, but they revived so prodigiously, under the well-timed shock, that, for the period we speak of, the poor gentleman seemed, with a continuance, with indeed an enhancement, of his fine old knack, to have the successive editions all to himself. They had been always of course, the Papers, very largely about him, but it was not too much to say that at this crisis they were about nothing else worth speaking of; so that our young woman could but groan in spirit at the direful example set to the emulous. She spared an occasional moment to the vision of Mortimer Marshal, saw him drunk, as she might have said, with the mere fragrance of the wine of glory, and asked herself what art Bight would now use to furnish him forth as he had promised. The mystery of Beadel's course loomed, each hour, so much larger and darker that the plan would have to be consummate, or the private knowledge alike beyond cavil and beyond calculation, which should attempt either to sound or to mask the appearances. Strangely enough, none the less, she even now found herself thinking of her rash colleague as attached, for the benefit of his surviving victim, to this idea; she went in fact so far as to imagine him half-upheld, while the public wonder spent itself, by the prospect of the fun he might still have with Marshal. This implied, she was not unconscious, that his notion of fun was infernal, and would of course be especially so were his knowledge as real as she supposed it. He would inflate their foolish friend with knowledge that was false and so start him as a balloon for the further gape of the world. This was the image, in turn, that would yield the last sport—the droll career of the wretched man as wandering forever through space under the apprehension, in time duly gained, that the least touch of earth would involve the smash of his car. Afraid, thus, to drop, but at the same time equally out of conceit of the chill air of the upper and increasing solitudes to which he had soared, he would become such a diminishing speck, though traceably a prey to wild human gyrations, as she might conceive Bight to keep in view for future recreation.
It wasn't however the future that was actually so much in question for them all as the immediately near present, offered to her as the latter was in the haunting light of the inevitably unlimited character of any real inquiry. The inquiry of the Papers, immense and ingenious, had yet for her the saving quality that she didn't take it as real. It abounded, truly, in hypotheses, most of them lurid enough, but a certain ease of mind as to what these might lead to was perhaps one of the advantages she owed to her constant breathing of Fleet Street air. She couldn't quite have said why, but she felt it wouldn't be the Papers that, proceeding from link to link, would arrive vindictively at Bight's connection with his late client. The enjoyment of that consummation would rest in another quarter, and if the young man were as uneasy now as she thought he ought to be even while she hoped he wasn't, it would be from the fear in his eyes of such justice as was shared with the vulgar. The Papers held an inquiry, but the Authorities, as they vaguely figured to her, would hold an inquest; which was a matter—even when international, complicated and arrangeable, between Frankfort and London, only on some system unknown to her—more in tune with possibilities of exposure. It was not, as need scarce be said, from the exposure of Beadel that she averted herself; it was from the exposure of the person who had made of Beadel's danger, Beadel's dread—whatever these really represented—the use that the occurrence at Frankfort might be shown to certify. It was well before her, at all events, that if Howard Bight's reflections, so stimulated, kept pace at all with her own, he would at the worst, or even at the best, have been glad to meet her again. It was her knowing that and yet lying low that she privately qualified as cowardice; it was the instinct of watching and waiting till she should see how great the danger might become. And she had moreover another reason, which we shall presently learn. The extra-specials meanwhile were to be had in Kilburnia almost as soon as in the Strand; the little ponied and painted carts, tipped at an extraordinary angle, by which they were disseminated, had for that matter, she observed, never rattled up the Edgware Road at so furious a rate. Each evening, it was true, when the flare of Fleet Street would have begun really to smoke, she had, in resistance to old habit, a little to hold herself; but for three successive days she tided over that crisis. It was not till the fourth night that her reaction suddenly declared itself, determined as it partly was by the latest poster that dangled free at the door of a small shop just out of her own street. The establishment dealt in buttons, pins, tape, and silver bracelets, but the branch of its industry she patronised was that of telegrams, stamps, stationery, and the "Edinburgh rock" offered to the appetite of the several small children of her next-door neighbour but one. "The Beadel-Muffet Mystery, Startling Disclosures, Action of the Treasury"—at these words she anxiously gazed; after which she decided. It was as if from her hilltop, from her very house-top, to which the window of her little room was contiguous, she had seen the red light in the east. It had, this time, its colour. She went on, she went far, till she met a cab, which she hailed, "regardless," she felt, as she had hailed one after leaving Bight by the river. "To Fleet Street" she simply said, and it took her—that she felt too—back into life.
Yes, it was life again, bitter, doubtless, but with a taste, when, having stopped her cab, short of her indication, in Covent Garden, she walked across southward and to the top of the street in which she and her friend had last parted with Mortimer Marshal. She came down to their favoured pothouse, the scene of Bight's high compact with that worthy, and here, hesitating, she paused, uncertain as to where she had best look out. Her conviction, on her way, had but grown; Howard Bight would be looking out—that to a certainty; something more, something portentous, had happened (by her evening paper, scanned in the light of her little shop window, she had taken instant possession of it), and this would have made him know that she couldn't keep up what he would naturally call her "game." There were places where they often met, and the diversity of these—not too far apart, however,—would be his only difficulty. He was on the prowl, in fine, with his hat over his eyes; and she hadn't known, till this vision of him came, what seeds of romance were in her soul. Romance, the other night, by the river, had brushed them with a wing that was like the blind bump of a bat, but that had been something on his part, whereas this thought of bringing him succour as to a Russian anarchist, to some victim of society or subject of extradition, was all her own, and was of this special moment. She saw him with his hat over his eyes; she saw him with his overcoat collar turned up; she saw him as a hunted hero cleverly drawn in one of the serialising weeklies or, as they said, in some popular "ply," and the effect of it was to open to her on the spot a sort of happy sense of all her possible immorality. That was the romantic sense, and everything vanished but the richness of her thrill. She knew little enough what she might have to do for him, but her hope, as sharp as a pang, was that, if anything, it would put her in danger too. The hope, as it happened then, was crowned on the very spot; she had never so felt in danger as when, just now, turning to the glazed door of their cookshop, she saw a man, within, close behind the glass, still, stiff and ominous, looking at her hard. The light of the place was behind him, so that his face, in the dusk of the side-street, was dark, but it was visible that she showed for him as an object of interest. The next thing, of course, she had seen more—seen she could be such an object, in such a degree, only to her friend himself, and that Bight had been thus sure of her; and the next thing after that had passed straight in and been met by him, as he stepped aside to admit her, in silence. He had his hat pulled down and, quite forgetfully, in spite of the warmth within, the collar of his mackintosh up.
It was his silence that completed the perfection of these things—the perfection that came out most of all, oddly, after he had corrected them by removal and was seated with her, in their common corner, at tea, with the room almost to themselves and no one to consider but Marshal's little man in the obvious wig and the blue spectacles, the great authority on the inner life of the criminal classes. Strangest of all, nearly, was it, that, though now essentially belonging, as Maud felt, to this order, they were not conscious of the danger of his presence. What she had wanted most immediately to learn was how Bight had known; but he made, and scarce to her surprise, short work of that. "I've known every evening—known, that is, that you've wanted to come; and I've been here every evening, waiting just there till I should see you. It was but a question of time. To-night, however, I was sure—for there's, after all, something of me left. Besides, besides———!" He had, in short, another certitude. "You've been ashamed—I knew, when I saw nothing come, that you would be. But also that that would pass."
Maud found him, as she would have said, all there. "I've been ashamed, you mean, of being afraid?"
"You've been ashamed about Mrs. Chorner; that is, about me. For that you did go to her I know."
"Have you been then yourself?"
"For what do you take me?" He seemed to wonder. "What had I to do with her—except for you?" And then before she could say: "Didn't she receive you?"
"Yes, as you said, she 'wanted' me."
"She jumped at you?"
"Jumped at me. She gave me an hour."
He flushed with an interest that, the next moment, had flared in spite of everything into amusement. "So that I was right, in my perfect wisdom, up to the hilt?"
"Up to the hilt. She took it from me."
"That the public wants her?"
"That it won't take a refusal. So she opened up."
"Overflowed?"
"Prattled."
"Gushed?"
"Well, recognised and embraced her opportunity. Kept me there till midnight. Told me, as she called it, everything about everything."
They looked at each other long on it, and it determined in Bight at last a brave clatter of his crockery. "They're stupendous!"
"It's you that are," Maud replied, "to have found it out so. You know them down to the ground."
"Oh, what I've found out———!" But it was more than he could talk of then. "If I hadn't really felt sure, I wouldn't so have urged you. Only now, if you please, I don't understand your having apparently but kept her in your pocket."
"Of course you don't," said Maud Blandy. To which she added, "And I don't quite myself. I only know that now that I have her there nothing will induce me to take her out."
"Then you potted her, permit me to say," he answered, "on absolutely false pretences."
"Absolutely; which is precisely why I've been ashamed. I made for home with the whole thing," she explained, "and there, that night, in the hours till morning, when, turning it over, I saw all it really was, I knew that I couldn't—that I would rather choose that shame, that of not doing for her what I had offered, than the hideous honesty of bringing it out. Because, you see," Maud declared, "it was—well, it was too much."
Bight followed her with a sharpness! "It was so good?"
"Quite beautiful! Awful!"
He wondered. "Really charming?"
"Charming, interesting, horrible. It was true—and it was the whole thing. It was herself and it was him, all of him too. Not a bit made up, but just the poor woman melted and overflowing, yet at the same time raging—like the hot-water tap when it boils. I never saw anything like it; everything, as you guaranteed, came out; it has made me know things. So, to have come down here with it, to have begun to hawk it, either through you, as you kindly proposed, or in my own brazen person, to the highest bidder—well, I felt that I didn't have to, after all, if I didn't want to, and that if it's the only way I can get money I would much rather starve."
"I see." Howard Bight saw all. "And that's why you're ashamed?"
She hesitated—she was both so remiss and so firm. "I knew that by my not coming back to you, you would have guessed, have found me wanting; just, for that matter, as she has found me. And I couldn't explain. I can't—I can't to her. So that," the girl went on, "I shall have done, so far as her attitude to me was to be concerned, something more indelicate, something more indecent, than if I had passed her on. I shall have wormed it all out of her, and then, by not having carried it to market, disappointed and cheated her. She was to have heard it cried like fresh herring."
Bight was immensely taken. "Oh, beyond all doubt. You're in a fix. You've played, you see, a most unusual game. The code allows everything but that."
"Precisely. So I must take the consequences. I'm dishonoured, but I shall have to bear it. And I shall bear it by getting out. Out, I mean, of the whole thing. I shall chuck them."
"Chuck the Papers?" he asked in his simplicity.
But his wonder, she saw, was overdone—their eyes too frankly met. "Damn the Papers!" said Maud Blandy.
It produced in his sadness and weariness the sweetest smile that had yet broken through. "We shall, between us, if we keep it up, ruin them! And you make nothing," he went on, "of one's having at last so beautifully started you? Your complaint," he developed, "was that you couldn't get in. Then suddenly, with a splendid jump, you are in. Only, however, to look round you and say with disgust ' Oh, here?' Where the devil do you want to be?"
"Ah, that's another question. At least," she said, "I can scrub floors. I can take it out perhaps—my swindle of Mrs. Chorner," she pursued—"in scrubbing hers."
He only, after this, looked at her a little. "She has written to you?"
"Oh, in high dudgeon. I was to have attended to the 'press-cutting' people as well, and she was to have seen herself, at the furthest, by the second morning (that was day-before-yesterday) all over the place. She wants to know what I mean."
"And what do you answer?"
"That it's hard, of course, to make her understand, but that I've felt her, since parting with her, simply to be too good."
"Signifying by it, naturally," Bight amended, "that you've felt yourself to be so."
"Well, that too if you like. But she was exquisite."
He considered. "Would she do for a ply?"
"Oh God, no!"
"Then for a tile?"
"Perhaps," said Maud Blandy at last.
He understood, visibly, the shade, as well as the pause; which, together, held him a moment. But it was of something else he spoke. "And you who had found they would never bite!"
"Oh, I was wrong," she simply answered. "Once they've tasted blood———!"
"They want to devour," her friend laughed, "not only the bait and the hook, but the line and the rod and the poor fisherman himself? Except," he continued, "that poor Mrs. Chorner hasn't yet even 'tasted.' However," he added, "she obviously will."
Maud's assent was full. "She'll find others. She'll appear."
He waited a moment—his eye had turned to the door of the street. "Then she must be quick. These are things of the hour."
"You hear something?" she asked, his expression having struck her.
He listened again, but it was nothing. "No—but it's somehow in the air."
"What is?"
"Well, that she must hurry. She must get in. She must get out." He had his arms on the table, and, locking his hands and inclining a little, he brought his face nearer to her. "My sense to-night's of an openness———! I don't know what's the matter. Except, that is, that you're great."
She looked at him, not drawing back. "You know everything—so immeasurably more than you admit or than you tell me. You mortally perplex and worry me."
It made him smile. "You're great, you're great," he only repeated. "You know it's quite awfully swagger, what you've done."
"What I haven't, you mean; what I never shall. Yes," she added, but now sinking back—"of course you see that too. What don't you see, and what, with such ways, is to be the end of you?"
"You're great, you're great"—he kept it up. "And I like you. That's to be the end of me."
So, for a minute, they left it, while she came to the thing that, for the last half-hour, had most been with her. "What is the 'action,' announced to-night, of the Treasury?"
"Oh, they've sent somebody out, partly, it would seem, at the request of the German authorities, to take possession."
"Possession, you mean, of his effects?"
"Yes, and legally, administratively, of the whole matter."
"Seeing, you mean, that there's still more in it———?"
"Than meets the eye," said Bight, "precisely. But it won't be till the case is transferred, as it presently will be, to this country, that they will see. Then it will be funny."
"Funny?" Maud Blandy asked.
"Oh, lovely."
"Lovely for you?"
"Why not? The bigger the whole thing grows, the lovelier."
"You've odd notions," she said, "of loveliness. Do you expect his situation won't be traced to you? Don't you suppose you'll be forced to speak?"
"To 'speak'———?"
"Why, if it is traced. What do you make, other wise, of the facts to-night?"
"Do you call them facts?" the young man asked.
"I mean the Astounding Disclosures."
"Well, do you only read your headlines? 'The most astounding disclosures are expected'—that's the valuable text. Is it," he went on, "what fetched you?"
His answer was so little of one that she made her own scant. "What fetched me is that I can't rest."
"No more can I," he returned. "But in what danger do you think me?"
"In any in which you think yourself. Why not, if I don't mean in danger of hanging?"
He looked at her so that she presently took him for serious at last—which was different from his having been either worried or perverse. "Of public discredit, you mean—for having so unmercifully baited him? Yes," he conceded with a straightness that now surprised her, "I've thought of that. But how can the baiting be proved?"
"If they take possession of his effects won't his effects be partly his papers, and won't they, among them, find letters from you, and won't your letters show it?"
"Well, show what?"
"Why, the frenzy to which you worked him—and thereby your connection."
"They won't show it to dunderheads."
"And are they all dunderheads?"
"Every mother's son of them—where anything so beautiful is concerned."
"Beautiful?" Maud murmured.
"Beautiful, my letters are—gems of the purest ray. I'm covered."
She let herself go—she looked at him long. "You're a wonder. But all the same," she added, "you don't like it."
"Well, I'm not sure." Which clearly meant, however, that he almost was, from the way in which, the next moment, he had exchanged the question for another. "You haven't anything to tell me of Mrs. Chorner's explanation?"
Oh, as to this, she had already considered and chosen. "What do you want of it when you know so much more? So much more, I mean, than even she has known."
"Then she hasn't known———?"
"There you are! What," asked Maud, "are you talking about?"
She had made him smile, even though his smile was perceptibly pale; and he continued. "Of what was behind. Behind any game of mine. Behind everything."
"So am I then talking of that. No," said Maud, "she hasn't known, and she doesn't know, I judge, to this hour. Her explanation therefore doesn't bear upon that. It bears upon something else."
"Well, my dear, on what?"
He was not, however, to find out by simply calling her his dear; for she had not sacrificed the reward of her interview in order to present the fine flower of it, unbridled, even to him. "You know how little you've ever told me, and you see how, at this instant, even while you press me to gratify you, you give me nothing. I give," she smiled—yet not a little flushed—"nothing for nothing."
He showed her he felt baffled, but also that she was perverse. "What you want of me is what, originally, you wouldn't hear of: anything so dreadful, that is, as his predicament must be. You saw that to make him want to keep quiet he must have something to be ashamed of, and that was just what, in pity, you positively objected to learning. You've grown," Bight smiled, "more interested since."
"If I have," said Maud, "it's because you have. Now, at any rate, I'm not afraid."
He waited a moment. "Are you very sure?"
"Yes, for my mystification is greater at last than my delicacy. I don't know till I do know"—and she expressed this even with difficulty—"what it has been, all the while, that it was a question of, and what, consequently, all the while, we've been talking about."
"Ah, but why should you know?" the young man inquired. "I can understand your needing to, or somebody's needing to, if we were in a ply, or even, though in a less degree, if we were in a tile. But since, my poor child, we're only in the delicious muddle of life itself———!"
"You may have all the plum of the pudding, and I nothing but a mouthful of cold suet?" Maud pushed back her chair; she had taken up her old gloves; but while she put them on she kept in view both her friend and her grievance. "I don't believe," she at last brought out, "that there is, or that there ever was, anything."
"Oh, oh, oh!" Bight laughed.
"There's nothing," she continued, "behind. There's no horror."
"You hold, by that," said Bight, "that the poor man's deed is all me? That does make it, you see, bad for me."
She got up and, there before him, finished smoothing her creased gloves. "Then we are—if there's such richness—in a ply."
"Well, we are not, at all events—so far as we ourselves are concerned—the spectators." And he also got up. "The spectators must look out for themselves."
"Evidently, poor things!" Maud sighed. And as he still stood as if there might be something for him to come from her, she made her attitude clear—which was quite the attitude now of tormenting him a little. "If you know something about him which she doesn't, and also which I don't, she knows something about him—as I do too—which you don't."
"Surely: when it's exactly what I'm trying to get out of you. Are you afraid I'll sell it?"
But even this taunt, which she took moreover at its worth, didn't move her. "You definitely then won't tell me?"
"You mean that if I will you'll tell me?"
She thought again. "Well—yes. But on that condition alone."
"Then you're safe," said Howard Bight. " I can't, really, my dear, tell you. Besides, if it's to come out———!"
"I'll wait in that case till it does. But I must warn you," she added, "that my facts won't come out."
He considered. "Why not, since the rush at her is probably even now being made? Why not, if she receives others?"
Well, Maud could think too. "She'll receive them, but they won't receive her. Others are like your people—dunderheads. Others won't understand, won't count, won't exist." And she moved to the door. "There are no others." Opening the door, she had reached the street with it, even while he replied, overtaking her, that there were certainly none such as herself; but they had scarce passed out before her last remark was, to their somewhat disconcerted sense, sharply enough refuted. There was still the other they had forgotten, and that neglected quantity, plainly in search of them and happy in his instinct of the chase, now stayed their steps in the form of Mortimer Marshal.