“Have we a lot of money in the bank?”
“Not an enormous quantity, but enough to go on without selling out.”
“What does that mean?”
He tried to explain the meaning of investments, of stocks and shares, but that was beyond her capacity and her immediate interest. She had begun to think practically of her money, and she said:
“Some of these people have nothing at all.”
And she made him show her how to write a check, and they hunted up all the poorer members of the company—those who had any money were already gone in search of work—and she gave them all enough to pay their rent and for their journey to their homes. Then she wrote to Enid’s husband and gave him all sorts of messages that had not been entrusted to her, said that thirty-five shillings had been found in Enid’s purse and sent that amount to him.
They stayed for the inquest, and Enid’s husband came. He said what a good wife she had been to him, and what cruel times they had been through together, and how he couldn’t believe it, and it wasn’t like her to do such a thing, and she would have been another Florence St. John if she hadn’t married him, and he hadn’t got the name of a Jonah. “S’elp me God!” he said, “she was the right stuff on and off the stage, and them as hasn’t had cruel times and been a Jonah won’t ever understand what she’s been to me.” Through his incoherence there shone a beauty of dumb, humble and trusting love that now triumphed over death as it had triumphed over the monotonous, degrading slips and deprivations of life. Before it Old Mole bowed his head and felt a sort of envy, a regret that he, too, had not had cruel times and been a Jonah.
Clumsily he tried to tell Matilda how he felt, but she could hardly bear to talk of Enid and closed every reference to her with:
“If I had known I could have saved her. I ought to have known.”