Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (131 page)

“I’m not in love with him.”

“A man about whom you know absolutely nothing.”

“Not in love with him.”

“Where does he come from? Who is he?”

“I don’t know, don’t care; nothing to do with me.”

“Just because of his soft eyes, and his wheedling voice, and that half-caressing, half-devotional manner of his. Do you imagine he keeps it specially for you? I gave you credit for more sense.”

“I’m not in love with him, I tell you. He’s down on his luck, and I’m sorry for him, that’s all.”

“And if he is, whose fault was it, do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter. We are none of us saints. He’s trying to pull himself together, and I respect him for it. It’s our duty to be charitable and kind to one another in this world!”

“Oh, well, I’ll tell you how you can be kind to him: by pointing out to him that he is wasting his time. With his talents, now that he knows his business, he could be on the staff of some big paper, earning a good income. Put it nicely to him, but be firm. Insist on his going. That will be showing true kindness to him — and to yourself, too, I’m thinking, my dear.”

And Tommy understood and appreciated the sound good sense underlying Jane’s advice, and the very next day but one, seizing the first opportunity, acted upon it; and all would have gone as contemplated if only Dick Danvers had sat still and listened, as it had been arranged in Tommy’s programme that he should.

“But I don’t want to go,” said Dick.

“But you ought to want to go. Staying here with us you are doing yourself no good.”

He rose and came to where she stood with one foot upon the fender, looking down into the fire. His doing this disconcerted her. So long as he remained seated at the other end of the room, she was the sub-editor, counselling the staff for its own good. Now that she could not raise her eyes without encountering his, she felt painfully conscious of being nothing more important than a little woman who was trembling.

“It is doing me all the good in the world,” he told her, “being near to you.”

“Oh, please do sit down again,” she urged him. “I can talk to you so much better when you’re sitting down.”

But he would not do anything he should have done that day. Instead he took her hands in his, and would not let them go; and the reason and the will went out of her, leaving her helpless.

“Let me be with you always,” he pleaded. “It means the difference between light and darkness to me. You have done so much for me. Will you not finish your work? Will you not trust me? It is no hot passion that can pass away, my love for you. It springs from all that is best in me — from the part of me that is wholesome and joyous and strong, the part of me that belongs to you.”

Releasing her, he turned away.

“The other part of me — the blackguard — it is dead, dear, — dead and buried. I did not know I was a blackguard, I thought myself a fine fellow, till one day it came home to me. Suddenly I saw myself as I really was. And the sight of the thing frightened me and I ran away from it. I said to myself I would begin life afresh, in a new country, free of every tie that could bind me to the past. It would mean poverty — privation, maybe, in the beginning. What of that? The struggle would brace me. It would be good sport. Ah, well, you can guess the result: the awakening to the cold facts, the reaction of feeling. In what way was I worse than other men? Who was I, to play the prig in a world where others were laughing and dining? I had tramped your city till my boots were worn into holes. I had but to abandon my quixotic ideals — return to where shame lay waiting for me, to be welcomed with the fatted calf. It would have ended so had I not chanced to pass by your door that afternoon and hear you strumming on the piano.”

So Billy was right, after all, thought Tommy to herself, the piano does help.

“It was so incongruous — a piano in Crane Court — I looked to see where the noise came from. I read the name of the paper on the doorpost. ‘It will be my last chance,’ I said to myself. ‘This shall decide it.’”

He came back to her. She had not moved. “I am not afraid to tell you all this. You are so big-hearted, so human; you will understand, you can forgive. It is all past. Loving you tells a man that he has done with evil. Will you not trust me?”

She put her hands in his. “I am trusting you,” she said, “with all my life. Don’t make a muddle of it, dear, if you can help it.”

It was an odd wooing, as Tommy laughingly told herself when she came to think it over in her room that night. But that is how it shaped itself.

What troubled her most was that he had not been quite frank with Peter, so that Peter had to defend her against herself.

“I attacked you so suddenly,” explained Peter, “you had not time to think. You acted from instinct. A woman seeks to hide her love even from herself.”

“I expect, after all, I am more of a girl than a boy,” feared Tommy: “I seem to have so many womanish failings.”

Peter took himself into quite places and trained himself to face the fact that another would be more to her than he had ever been, and Clodd went about his work like a bear with a sore head; but they neither of them need have troubled themselves so much. The marriage did not take place till nearly fifteen years had passed away, and much water had to flow beneath old London Bridge before that day.

The past is not easily got rid of. A tale was once written of a woman who killed her babe and buried it in a lonely wood, and later stole back in the night and saw there, white in the moonlight, a child’s hand calling through the earth, and buried it again and yet again; but always that white baby hand called upwards through the earth, trample it down as she would. Tommy read the story one evening in an old miscellany, and sat long before the dead fire, the book open on her lap, and shivered; for now she knew the fear that had been haunting her.

Tommy lived expecting her. She came one night when Tommy was alone, working late in the office. Tommy knew her the moment she entered the door, a handsome woman, with snake-like, rustling skirts. She closed the door behind her, and drawing forward a chair, seated herself the other side of the desk, and the two looked long and anxiously at one another.

“They told me I should find you here alone,” said the woman. “It is better, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Tommy, “it is better.”

“Tell me,” said the woman, “are you very much in love with him?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“Because, if not — if you have merely accepted him thinking him a good catch — which he isn’t, my dear; hasn’t a penny to bless himself with, and never will if he marries you — why, then the matter is soon settled. They tell me you are a business-like young lady, and I am prepared to make a business-like proposition.”

There was no answer. The woman shrugged her shoulders.

“If, on the other hand, you are that absurd creature, a young girl in love — why, then, I suppose we shall have to fight for him.”

“It would be more sporting, would it not?” suggested Tommy.

“Let me explain before you decide,” continued the woman. “Dick Danvers left me six months ago, and has kept from me ever since, because he loved me.”

“It sounds a curious reason.”

“I was a married woman when Dick Danvers and I first met. Since he left me — for my sake and his own — I have received information of my husband’s death.”

“And does Dick — does he know?” asked the girl.

“Not yet. I have only lately learnt the news myself.”

“Then if it is as you say, when he knows he will go back to you.”

“There are difficulties in the way.”

“What difficulties?”

“My dear, this. To try and forget me, he has been making love to you. Men do these things. I merely ask you to convince yourself of the truth. Go away for six months — disappear entirely. Leave him free — uninfluenced. If he loves you — if it be not merely a sense of honour that binds him — you will find him here on your return. If not — if in the interval I have succeeded in running off with him, well, is not the two or three thousand pounds I am prepared to put into this paper of yours a fair price for such a lover?”

Tommy rose with a laugh of genuine amusement. She could never altogether put aside her sense of humour, let Fate come with what terrifying face it would.

“You may have him for nothing — if he is that man,” the girl told her; “he shall be free to choose between us.”

“You mean you will release him from his engagement?”

“That is what I mean.”

“Why not take my offer? You know the money is needed. It will save your father years of anxiety and struggle. Go away — travel, for a couple of months, if you’re afraid of the six. Write him that you must be alone, to think things over.”

The girl turned upon her.

“And leave you a free field to lie and trick?”

The woman, too, had risen. “Do you think he really cares for you? At the moment you interest him. At nineteen every woman is a mystery. When the mood is past — and do you know how long a man’s mood lasts, you poor chit? Till he has caught what he is running after, and has tasted it — then he will think not of what he has won, but of what he has lost: of the society from which he has cut himself adrift; of all the old pleasures and pursuits he can no longer enjoy; of the luxuries — necessities to a man of his stamp — that marriage with you has deprived him of. Then your face will be a perpetual reminder to him of what he has paid for it, and he will curse it every time he sees it.”

“You don’t know him,” the girl cried. “You know just a part of him — the part you would know. All the rest of him is a good man, that would rather his self-respect than all the luxuries you mention — you included.”

“It seems to resolve itself into what manner of man he is,” laughed the woman.

The girl looked at her watch. “He will be here shortly; he shall tell us himself.”

“How do you mean?”

“That here, between the two of us, he shall decide — this very night.” She showed her white face to the woman. “Do you think I could live through a second day like to this?”

“The scene would be ridiculous.”

“There will be none here to enjoy the humour of it.”

“He will not understand.”

“Oh, yes, he will,” the girl laughed. “Come, you have all the advantages; you are rich, you are clever; you belong to his class. If he elects to stop with me, it will be because he is my man — mine. Are you afraid?”

The woman shivered. She wrapped her fur cloak about her closer and sat down again, and Tommy returned to her proofs. It was press-night, and there was much to be done.

He came a little later, though how long the time may have seemed to the two women one cannot say. They heard his footstep on the stair. The woman rose and went forward, so that when he opened the door she was the first he saw. But he made no sign. Possibly he had been schooling himself for this moment, knowing that sooner or later it must come. The woman held out her hand to him with a smile.

“I have not the honour,” he said.

The smile died from her face. “I do not understand,” she said.

“I have not the honour,” he repeated. “I do not know you.”

The girl was leaning with her back against the desk in a somewhat mannish attitude. He stood between them. It will always remain Life’s chief comic success: the man between two women. The situation has amused the world for so many years. Yet, somehow, he contrived to maintain a certain dignity.

“Maybe,” he continued, “you are confounding me with a Dick Danvers who lived in New York up to a few months ago. I knew him well — a worthless scamp you had done better never to have met.”

“You bear a wonderful resemblance to him,” laughed the woman.

“The poor fool is dead,” he answered. “And he left for you, my dear lady, this dying message: that, from the bottom of his soul, he was sorry for the wrong he had done you. He asked you to forgive him — and forget him.”

“The year appears to be opening unfortunately for me,” said the woman. “First my lover, then my husband.”

He had nerved himself to fight the living. This was a blow from the dead. The man had been his friend.

“Dead?”

“He was killed, it appears, in that last expedition in July,” answered the woman. “I received the news from the Foreign Office only a fortnight ago.”

An ugly look came into his eyes — the look of a cornered creature fighting for its life. “Why have you followed me here? Why do I find you here alone with her? What have you told her?”

The woman shrugged her shoulders. “Only the truth.”

“All the truth?” he demanded—”all? Ah! be just. Tell her it was not all my fault. Tell her all the truth.”

“What would you have me tell her? That I played Potiphar’s wife to your Joseph?”

“Ah, no! The truth — only the truth. That you and I were a pair of idle fools with the devil dancing round us. That we played a fool’s game, and that it is over.”

“Is it over? Dick, is it over?” She flung her arms towards him; but he threw her from him almost brutally. “The man is dead, I tell you. His folly and his sin lie dead with him. I have nothing to do with you, nor you with me.”

“Dick!” she whispered. “Dick, cannot you understand? I must speak with you alone.”

But they did not understand, neither the man nor the child.

“Dick, are you really dead?” she cried. “Have you no pity for me? Do you think that I have followed you here to grovel at your feet for mere whim? Am I acting like a woman sane and sound? Don’t you see that I am mad, and why I am mad? Must I tell you before her? Dick—” She staggered towards him, and the fine cloak slipped from her shoulders; and then it was that Tommy changed from a child into a woman, and raised the other woman from the ground with crooning words of encouragement such as mothers use, and led her to the inner room. “Do not go,” she said, turning to Dick; “I shall be back in a few minutes.”

He crossed to one of the windows against which beat the City’s roar, and it seemed to him as the throb of passing footsteps beating down through the darkness to where he lay in his grave.

She re-entered, closing the door softly behind her. “It is true?” she asked.