“That kind of pride which refuses to take money from a woman is very admirable.” There was a note of cold sarcasm in her voice which made him writhe. “It is the attitude of mind behind man’s subconscious sense of superiority to the female of the species—not particularly flattering to a woman, but it must be immensely gratifying to a man! May I ask you another question, Mr. Peter Dawlish? Do you intend sinking down into the dregs? Is your vista of life lined on either side by common lodging-houses, with a pauper’s graveyard at the end of it?”
“I don’t exactly see what you’re driving at.”
She had made him angry, and, was secretly amused.
“I shall do my best, naturally, to find work. I had an idea of going abroad.”
“Exactly.” She nodded. “To one of the colonies. It is the most popular of all delusions that people without grit or ambition can magically acquire these qualities the moment they go ashore at Quebec or Sydney, or wherever their high spirits lead them.”
He was laughing now in spite of himself.
“You’ve certainly got a knack of riling a man.”
“Haven’t I?” she smiled. “I’ll tell you what I was driving at, Mr. Dawlish. For you to refuse a loan of money now suggests that you’re perfectly satisfied in your mind that you will never earn enough to repay the loan. The only way you can justify a refusal of money is to believe that you can never pay it back; that you’re going to belong to the bread lines and the park benches and the public charities.”
She saw that her shaft had got home, and went on quickly:
“Of course, you will do nothing of the sort! You’ve come out of prison with a grievance against the world, and you’re hardly to be blamed for that. I should imagine you are one of the few innocent men who ever went to Dartmoor.”
He looked at her shrewdly.
“You believe I was innocent?”
She nodded.
“I’m pretty sure,” she said, and then: “Do you carry a gun?”
He laughed aloud.
“The price of a Browning pistol would keep me in luxury for two months,” he said. “No, I carry nothing more dangerous than a toothbrush.”
The drawer from which she had taken the cigarettes was still open, and she put in her hand and took out a small black cashbox, and jerked back the lid.
“We will do this thing in a businesslike way,” she said. “You will find a paper and pencil on the desk; sign an I.O.U. for twenty pounds. If you believe in your heart of hearts that you’ll be unable to pay me back, that a man of twenty-nine or twenty-eight, or whatever age you are, will never earn a sufficient margin above his cost of living to send back that money in a year, or two years, then you need not take a cent. And this little bit of charity, as you call it—”
“I’ve called it nothing of the sort.”
“In your mind you have,” she said calmly. “It is very rude to contradict a lady! Now, Mr. Dawlish, I challenge you. If you think you are permanently down and out, the incident is finished—and I think you’re finished, too.”
She looked at him through her half-closed eyes, nodding slowly.
“You mean I’m not worth salving?” he said, and got up. “I’ll accept your challenge.”
He took the pencil, scribbled a few words on the writing-pad, and, tearing it off, handed it to the girl.
“Produce your twenty pounds.”
He was amused in a sour way, but his anger was mostly directed inward to himself, that he should be angry at all. If anybody had told him, when he had walked into that room, that he would accept a loan of money from the girl who had not been absent from his thoughts since he had met her, he would have laughed at such a suggestion. Yet here he was, counting solemnly the Treasury notes as they were handed to him, and pocketing them without one single qualm of conscience.
“I think I’m beginning to know myself,” he said. “I started a weakling, and prison hasn’t improved me. No, no, I do not mean that it is a weakness to accept this money, but it would have been a weakness to have refused. I’m awfully obliged to you.”
She held out her hand.
“Where will you be staying?” she asked.
“I don’t know. But I will keep in touch with you. Please don’t bother about me any more. If I can’t get a job of some kind I’m really not worth helping. Why are you doing this? It isn’t part of the usual police procedure.”
She shook her head.
“The police help where they can; you ought to know that,” she said quietly. “But I admit that this is a purely personal action on my part. You are part of a big experiment. It isn’t my womanly heart, but my scientific brain that is dictating just now.” And then, going off at a tangent: “I wish you would shave yourself, Mr. Dawlish; you look too much like a musical genius to be thoroughly wholesome.”
He was still chuckling to himself when Lucretia closed the outer door upon him with unnecessary violence.
He knew a small temperance hotel where he could sleep that night, a place in Lambeth, near Waterloo Station. “Temperance Hotel” was rather a grand name for an establishment which was only a little superior to a common lodging-house, but he guessed it was too late to get a bed at any of the Rowton Houses.
He walked briskly down Charing Cross Road and into the Strand, crowded with cars and taxis, for the theatres were closing, and the northern sidewalk was almost impassable. And then he thought he saw his mother preceding another lady into a car, and stopped. Yes, it was Margaret Dawlish, and the lady with the dirty grey hair was Aunt Anita. He could afford to grin
