Beggar’s Choice (2 page)

“There might be something between sponging on your friends and cutting them dead.”

“
Facilis descensus!
” I said.

She put out her hand, but I stepped back from it.

“There's your uncle, Car—why wouldn't you let him help you? I know he wanted to—he said so—he said he'd offered you the agency.”

I laughed.

“With conditions! Did he tell you what they were?”

She said “No,” quickly and as if I'd hurt her again. I supposed I spoke roughly, for she looked timid, and I felt a brute.

“You couldn't accept the conditions?” she said in a soft, hesitating way.

I shook my head. I wonder what she would have said if I'd told her that one of the conditions was marriage. What a fool I am! It wouldn't be anything to her one way or another—it wouldn't ever have been anything. If I had come to heel, licked my uncle's hand, taken his bone, and married Anna Lang, she'd have sent me a wedding present and wished me joy. It's an odd world. Anna wanted me, and I wanted Isobel, and so here I am in the gutter. Why, I never even liked Anna. I remember telling her so at a franker age. I suppose I was about fourteen, and she the same—all bones and eyes. I remember I told her straight out how jolly glad I was that she was only Uncle John's niece and not my cousin, and how she argued that if she was his niece, she was bound to be my cousin. And she finished up by flying into a most almighty rage and scratching my face. I told Uncle John the cat had done it, and the little spitfire burst into tears of pure rage and said, no, she'd done it herself because I didn't love her, and she'd do it again—and again—until I did.

All this went through my head in a sort of confusion. I think I tried to stop myself saying anything. When I found I couldn't, I said good-by, but I'm afraid my voice gave me away.

I said good-by, and Isobel said,

“Will you come and see me, Car?”

And I said, “No, my dear, I won't,” and I lifted my hat and walked on.

I walked as far as I could, and I didn't take very much notice of where I was going, but after a bit I got hold of myself and started to go home. I ought to have been thinking what I was going to do next, and what I was going to say to Mrs. Bell, and what I was going to tell Fay, but I couldn't think of anything or any one but Isobel. I was blundering along pretty fast, and I'd got within half a dozen blocks of the house, when some one pushed something into my hand. This is where the queer thing begins, and I want to put everything down very exactly. If I hadn't been wool-gathering, I should have seen the man's face as he came up to me. As it was, I just came out of the clouds to find a paper in my hand, and the man who had shoved it there shooting across the road diagonally with his back towards me and no more to be seen of him than a shabby suit of clothes, a greasy bowler hat, and a sheaf of handbills under his arm.

I looked down at the paper in my hand. It was the size of a handbill. But it wasn't a handbill; it was a blank sheet of paper with what looked like a newspaper cutting pasted on to the middle of it. I should have dropped a handbill in the gutter. When you're job-hunting, newspaper cuttings rather rivet your attention. I read this one. And here it is, word for word:

Do you want £500? If you do, and are willing to earn it, write to Box Z.10, International Employment Exchange, 187 Falcon Street, N.W.

I looked up from the paper and saw the man with the greasy bowler on the other side of the road. He thrust a handbill upon a girl in a sleeveless cotton frock and turned the corner. I hesitated for a moment, and then made after him at a good pace. When I reached the corner, he wasn't anywhere in sight. There are one or two shops, and about fifty yards down there's a public house. From the look of him he might have turned in there. I certainly hadn't any intention of following him. As I stood there, I saw one of his handbills lying half on the curb, where some one must have thrown it down—that is, I saw what at first sight I took to be one of his handbills. After a second glance I picked the paper up. It was of the same size and shape as my own, but instead of being a blank sheet with a newspaper cutting stuck on to it, it had typed across it the words, “Eat More Fruit and Encourage the Empire.”

I threw the paper down again and retraced my steps. There was a second handbill lying on the pavement a yard or two from where I had seen the man give one to the girl with the bare arms. I couldn't swear that it was the paper she had taken and then dropped, but there it lay, quite clean, and therefore newly dropped by some one; and, like the one I had picked up round the corner, it bore a typed exhortation to “Eat More Fruit and Encourage the Empire.”

I stood with the thing in my hand, and then after a bit I came back here and tried to think what it might mean. You see, it's odd—whatever way you look at it, it's odd. Here's a fellow distributing handbills about Eating More Fruit and Encouraging the Empire, and right in the middle of these blameless tracts he's got a newspaper cutting stuck on a blank sheet, and he shoves it off on me. Why me? That's what I want to know. Is it because it's me, or just because the thing was there by accident and some one was bound to get it? And if me—why? Of course you may say it's obvious that I could do with £500. Why, a fiver would be a godsend.

II

Isobel Tarrant stood quite still. She looked after Car Fairfax, but she didn't see him, because her eyes were full of hot, blinding tears. She had met him again after three years, and he was going—going, and in a moment he would be gone, and it might be three years, or it might be thirty, before she saw him again. Or never. The word knocked hard upon her heart—never, never, never,
never
. Never to know where he was, or what he was doing, or whether he was ill or well, or whether any one cared for him or looked after him, or even whether he was in the same world at all.

“I can't bear it,” she said under her breath. “Oh, I can't!”

And then, like a horrible echo, something said, “You've got to.”

With every bit of her strength Isobel said, “I
won't
!” She shook away two tears, and saw Car turn the corner with his old swing of the shoulders. The next moment she was beckoning a taxi.

“I want you to go round that corner slowly. I want you to follow a gentleman who has just gone round it—in a blue serge suit—a tall gentleman. I want you to follow him—but don't let him know.”

Isobel was rather breathless, and her cheeks burned. She sat back in the corner and wondered what the man must think. She didn't care, but she couldn't help wondering.

They turned the corner. She could see Car striding along with his head up. She leaned out of the window and said, “There—there!” and the man said, “All right, miss.”

She was late for lunch. Not that that mattered, as Aunt Willy was later still. Miss Williamina Tarrant had never been in time for anything in her life. In her own house meals occurred when she was hungry. At the moment, she and Isobel were on a visit to Aunt Carrie. Though Carrie Lester and Willy Tarrant had been sisters for sixty odd years, time never staled the infinite number of ways in which they annoyed one another.

Mrs. Lester was in the hall when Isobel came in. She had been drifting in and out of it for the last ten minutes like a small reproachful ghost, her pretty lined features quite puckered up with fretful disapproval.

“I'm so sorry, Aunt Carrie.”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Lester, “it's no use your being sorry, or my being sorry, or any one else being sorry. Your Aunt Willy gets more and more unpunctual, and why she can't be in to meals like other people I shall never understand. And Eliza is in one of her tempers—and I'm sure I don't wonder, because if I was a cook and had everything dished up and then had to put it all back again and go on keeping it hot—and then in the end your Aunt Willy will either not come home at all, or as likely as not she'll bring some one back with her—and though I hope I'm not inhospitable, one does have to consider one's servants a
little
, and I must say that I think Eliza has grounds for complaint—though of course your Aunt Willy thinks I spoil her—but, as I always say, I'd rather have one spoilt cook and keep her than have thirteen cooks in a year like your Aunt Willy.”

Mrs. Lester took a small lace-edged handkerchief out of a large gray silk bag and rubbed the tip of her nose with it until it was quite pink. Then she put the handkerchief back and shut the bag with a snap.

Aunt Carrie always reminded Isobel of a white rabbit—her pretty white hair; her tendency to get pink about the eyes and nose; her air of timid antagonism. As she went upstairs with Isobel, she looked like a rabbit at bay over its last lettuce leaf.

Just as they reached the top, the hall door burst open and Miss Willy Tarrant burst in. There was more to it than that, because actually a latchkey was introduced and withdrawn; but the effect was the effect invariably produced by Miss Willy's arrival. She burst in accompanied by several other people, and her voice, deep, full, and resonant, instantly filled the small house.

“Parker—I'm in. Where's Mrs. Lester? Oh, and Parker—three more to lunch—perhaps you'd better tell Eliza.” She surged towards the stairs. “Come along, Janet. Carrie! Car
rie!
Here we are. I've brought Janet to lunch. And I don't believe you know the Markhams—two of the very best. Bobby, this is my sister, though you wouldn't think it—and this is my niece, Isobel, who lives with me. Cis, where have you got to?”

Mrs. Lester remembered that she was a lady. She trembled with passion, but she shook hands with Janet Wimpole, who was a connection, with the fat bald-headed man who, most unsuitably, was Bobby, and with the thin dowdy girl, who appeared to be Cis.

Miss Willy filled the drawing-room with her deep voice, her presence, and her overpowering self-possession. She was tall and stout, but she seemed to be taller and stouter than she really was. She was tightly molded into a bright black satin garment relieved with pink. Her face was red and sunburned above the pale pink of a tulle scarf. Her black hair crisped and waved like a wig and was only lightly touched with gray. She had removed a pink felt hat as she came in, and it lay, where she had tossed it, on a table devoted to framed photographs of Mrs. Lester's grandchildren and a bowl of
potpourri
.

The gong sounded, and they went down to the dining-room. Each guest received about a tablespoonful of soup, after which Parker set down in front of her mistress a Sheffield entrée dish containing the six small cutlets which had been intended for the three ladies. “And not another bite, nor drop, nor bit, nor sup goes out of this kitchen,” Eliza had declared as she dished them up.

Miss Willy burst out laughing.

“I told you it would be pot luck—you can't say I didn't! But there's a ham. Parker, where's the ham? Bring up the ham, and we shan't starve.”

Parker looked at her mistress.

“The ham will do nicely,” said Mrs. Lester in a small pinched voice.

Parker coughed and drew nearer.

“If you please, ma'am, Eliza didn't think the ham was fit to send up.”

Mrs. Lester blenched visibly. She had lived for fifteen years with Eliza, and she recognized an ultimatum.

Miss Willy sprang to her feet.

“Oh, nonsense—nonsense! I'll go and see Eliza myself. It was a very good ham, and plenty of it. Help the cutlets, Carrie—I shan't be a moment—you and I and Isobel will have ham. You needn't come, Parker—I'll just go and speak to Eliza.”

Janet Wimpole wanted to laugh. She was a fair, lovable creature, a childless widow of thirty-five, at the beck and call of every one who wanted a child looked after, a girl chaperoned, or an invalid amused. She looked at Isobel and wondered why she was so pale. And then Miss Willy came back in triumph with the ham on a lordly dish.

It was when every one had been helped, to the accompaniment of loud-voiced instructions from Miss Willy, that Car's name suddenly emerged from a buzz of talk. Janet was not quite sure how it came up. Bobby Markham, and the girl called Cis, and Miss Willy were all talking at once, whilst she herself was leaning across Isobel to try and catch a twice repeated remark of Carrie Lester's. It was Bobby Markham, she thought, who said “Fairfax,” and as he said the word, Janet felt Isobel's arm move against her own with a wincing movement as if she had been suddenly hurt. Miss Willy caught up the name and, turning, flung it at Isobel.

“Car Fairfax—I was going to tell you—the most extraordinary thing—Bobby came across Car the other day. You know, we've always wondered what on earth had become of him.”

“Oh, I hope he's getting on,” said Janet. She leaned forward, screening Isobel.

“Now, my dear Janet, was he likely to get on, after having to leave his regiment and being mixed up with that atrocious Lymington man, who was nothing but a common swindler—and if I hadn't had the gumption to get my money out of his clutches just in the very nick of time, wouldn't Isobel and I be in the workhouse this very minute?”

“I hope not. But, Willy, you mustn't say he had to leave his regiment like that—it sounds——”

“Well, he did have to leave it,” said Miss Willy bluntly.

“Only because he hadn't enough money to stay in it. It wasn't his fault that his father had been living above his income for years and left nothing but debts.”

Miss Willy tossed her head.

“Pride goes before a fall. Bobby met him in his brother's office, standing in a queue on the chance of being taken on as twentieth clerk or something of that sort. Rather a come-down for Car Fairfax!” She laughed angrily and looked at Isobel. “He didn't even get the job,” she added, with malice in her voice. “But there, it wouldn't have helped him if he had. You can't help people who won't take help. He's gone under, and he's got his deserts.”