I
The affectionate if rather mocking friend who had said of Charles Granter, “He isn’t a man, he’s an edifice,” seemed justified to the thin dark man following him down Oakley Street, Chelsea, that early October afternoon. From the square foundations of his feet to his square fair beard and the top of his head under a square black bowler, he looked solid as granite, indestructible—too big to be taken by the board—only fit to be submarined. And the man dodging in his wake right down to the Embankment ran up once or twice under his counter and fell behind again as if appalled by the vessel’s size and unconsciousness. Considering the heat of the past summer the plane-trees were still very green, and few of their twittering leaves had dropped or turned yellow—just enough to confirm the glamorous melancholy of early fall. Granter, though he lived with his wife in some mansions close by, went out of his way to pass under those trees and look at the river. This seeming sign of weakness, perhaps, determined the shadowy man to dodge up again and become stationary close behind. Ravaged and streaked, as if he had lived submerged, he stood carefully noting with his darting dark eyes that they were quite alone; then, swallowing violently so that the strings of his lean neck writhed, he moved stealthily up beside Granter, and said in a hurried, hoarse voice: “Beg pardon, mister—ten pound, and I’ll say nothin’.”
The face which Granter turned toward that surprising utterance was a good illustration of the saying ‘things are not what they seem.’ Above that big building of a body it quivered, ridiculously alive and complex, as of a man full of nerves, humours, sarcasms; and a deep continuous chinking sound arose—of Charles Granter jingling coins in his trousers’ pocket. The quiver settled into raised eyebrows, into crow’s-feet running out on to the broad cheekbones, into a sarcastic smile drooping the corners of the lips between moustache and beard. He said in his rather high voice:
“What’s the matter with you, my friend?”
“There’s a lot the matter with me, mister. Down and out I am. I know where you live, I know your lady; but—ten pound and I’ll say nothin’.”
“About what?”
“About your visiting that gell, where you’ve just come from. Ten pound. It’s cheap—I’m a man of me word.”
With lips still sarcastically drooped, Granter made a little derisive sound. “Blackmail, by George!”
“Guv’nor—I’m desperate, I mean to have that ten pound. You give it me here at six o’clock this evenin’, if you ’aven’t got it on you.” His eyes flared suddenly in his hungry face. “But no tricks! I ain’t killed Huns for nothin’.”
Granter surveyed him for a moment, then turned his back and looked at the water.
“Well, you’ve got two hours to get it in—six o’clock, mister, just here; and no tricks—I warn you.”
The hoarse voice ceased, the sound of footsteps died away; Granter was alone. The smile still clung to his lips, but he was not amused; he was annoyed with the measured indignation of a big man highly civilised and innocent. Where had this ruffian sprung from? To be spied on, without knowing it, like this! His ears grew red. The damned scoundrel!
The thing was too absurd to pay attention to. But, instantly, his highly-sophisticated consciousness began to pay it attention. How many visits had he made to this distressed flower-girl? Three? And all because he didn’t like handing over the case to that society which always found out the worst. They said private charity was dangerous. Apparently it was! Blackmail! A consideration came, perching like a crow on the branches of his mind: Why hadn’t he mentioned the flower-girl to his wife and made her do the visiting? Why! Because Olga would have said the girl was a fraud. And perhaps she was! A put-up job! Would the scoundrel have ventured on this threat at all if the girl were not behind him? She might support him with lies! His wife might believe them—she—she had such a vein of cynicism! How sordid, how domestically unpleasant!
Granter felt quite sick. Every decent human value seemed suddenly in question. And a second crow came croaking: Could one leave a scoundrel like this to play his tricks with impunity? Oughtn’t one to go to the police? He stood extraordinarily still—a dappled leaf dropped from a plane-tree and lodged on his bowler hat; at the other end of him a little dog mistook him for a lamp-post. This was no joke! For a man with a reputation for humanity, integrity and common sense—no joke at all! A police court meant the prosecution of a fellow-creature; getting him perhaps a year’s imprisonment, when one had always felt that punishment practically never fitted crime! Staring at the river he seemed to see cruelty hovering over himself, his wife, society, the flower-girl, even over that scoundrel—naked cruelty, waiting to pounce on one or all. Which ever way one turned the thing was dirty, cruel. No wonder blackmail was accounted such a heinous crime. No other human act was so cold-blooded, spider-like, and slimy; none plunged so deadly a dagger into the bowels of compassion, so eviscerated humanity, so murdered faith! And it would have been even worse, if his conscience had not been clear. But was it so extremely clear? Would he have taken the trouble to go to that flower-girl’s dwelling, not once but three times, unless she had been attractive, unless her dark-brown eyes had been pretty, and her common voice so soft? Would he have visited the blowsy old flower-woman at that other corner, in circumstances, no doubt, just as strenuous? Honestly: No. Still, if he did like a pretty face he was not vicious—he was fastidious and detested subterfuge. But then Olga was so cynical, she would certainly ask him why he hadn’t visited the old flower-woman as well, and the lame man who sold matches, and all the other stray unfortunates of the neighbourhood. Well, there it was; and a bold course always the best! The bold course—which was it? To go to the police? To his wife? To that girl, and find out if she were in this ramp? To wait till six o’clock, meet the ruffian and shake the teeth out of him? Granter could not decide. All seemed equally bold—would do equally well. And a fifth course presented itself which seemed even bolder: Ignore the thing!
The tide had just turned, and the full waters below him were very still, of a sunlit soft grey colour. This stillness of the river restored to Charles Granter something of the impersonal mood in which he had crossed the Embankment to look at it. Here, by the mother stream of this great town, was he, tall, strong, well-fed, and, if not rich, quite comfortable; and here, too, were hundreds of thousands like that needy flower-girl and this shadowy scoundrel skating on the edge of destitution. And here was this water—to him a source of æsthetic enjoyment; to them—a possible last refuge. The girl had talked of it—beggar’s patter, perhaps, like the blackmailer’s words: “I’m desperate—I’m down and out.”
One wanted to be just! If he had known all about them—but he knew nothing!
‘Can’t believe she’s such an ungrateful little wretch!’ he thought; ‘I’ll go back and see her.’
He retraced his way up Oakley Street to the mews which she inhabited, and ascended a stairway scented with petrol. Through the open doorway he could see her baby, of doubtful authorship, seated in an empty flower-basket—a yellow baby, who stared up at him with the placidity of one recently fed. That stare seemed to Granter to be saying: ‘You look out that you’re not taken for my author. Have you got an alibi, old man?’ And almost unconsciously he began to calculate where he had been about fourteen or fifteen months ago. Not in London—thank goodness! In Brittany with his wife—all that July, August, and September. Jingling his money, he contemplated the baby. It seemed more, but it might be only four months old! The baby opened a toothless mouth, “Ga” it said, and stretched out a tiny hand. Granter ceased to jingle the coins and gazed round the room. The first time he came, a month ago, to test her street-corner story, its condition had been deplorable. His theory that people were never better than their environments had prompted the second visit, and that of this afternoon. He had wanted to know that he was not throwing away his money. And there certainly was some appearance of comfort now in a room so small that he and the baby and a bed almost filled it. But he felt a fool for ever having come there even with those best intentions which were the devil. And, turning to go, he saw the girl herself ascending the stairs, a paper bag in her hand, an evident bull’s-eye in her mouth, for a scent of peppermint preceded her. Surely her cheekbones were higher than he had thought, her eyebrows more oblique—a gipsy look! Her eyes, dark and lustrous as a hound puppy’s, smiled at him, and he said in his rather high voice:
“I came back to ask you something.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know a dark man with a thin face and a slight squint, who’s been in the Army?”
“What’s his name, sir?”
“I don’t know; but he followed me from here, and tried to blackmail me on the Embankment. You know what blackmail is?”
“No, sir.”
Feline, swift, furtive, she had passed him and taken up her baby, slanting her dark glance at him from behind it. Granter experienced a very queer sensation. Really it was as if—though he disliked poetic emphasis—as if he had suddenly seen something pre-civilised, pre-human, snake-like, cat-like, monkey-like too, in those dark sliding eyes and that yellow baby. She was in it; or, if not in it, she knew of it!
“A dangerous game, that,” he said. “Tell him—for his own good—he had better drop it.”
And, while he went, very square, downstairs, he thought: ‘This is one of the finest opportunities you ever had for getting to the bottom of human nature, and you’re running away from it.’ So strongly did this thought obsess him that he halted, in two minds, outside. A chauffeur, who was cleaning his car, looked at him curiously. Charles Granter moved away.