The manager waved him on, but from a distance safely beyond his reach. "You've forfeited it to the house. That'll teach you not to try your tricks again! On your way, scoundrel !"
Her voice suddenly rang out in sharp stridency: "You robbers! Give him back his money!"
"The pot calling the kettle black," someone said, and a general laugh went up, drowning the two of them out.
He was hustled across the floor, and out through a back door, probably to avoid scandalizing the diners below at the front. There was an unpainted wooden slat-stair there, clinging sideward to the building. They threw him all the way down to the bottom, and he lay there in the muddy back-alley. Miraculously unhurt, but smarting with such shame as he'd never known before, so that he wanted to turn his face into the mud and hide it there.
His hat was flung down after him, and after doing so the thrower ostentatiously brushed his hands, as if to avoid contamination.
But that was not the full measure of humiliation, ignominy. The final degradation was to see the door reopen suddenly, and Bonny came staggering through. Impelled forth, thrust forth by the clumsy sweaty hands of men, like any common thing.
His wife. His love.
A knife went through his heart, and it seemed to shrivel and fold and close over upon the blade that pierced it.
Pushed forth into the night, so that she too all but overbalanced and threatened to topple down after him, but clung to the rail and managed to hold herself back just in time.
She stood there motionless for a moment, above him, but looking, not back at them but down below her at him.
Then she came on down and passed him by with a lift of her skirts to avoid him, as though he were some sort of refuse lying there.
"Get up," she said shortly. "Get up and come away. I never heard of a man that can't win either way; can't win honestly, and can't win by cheating either."
He had never known the human voice could express such corrosive contempt before.
59
He foresaw the change in her that would surely follow this debacle before it had even come, so well did he know her now, so bitterly, so costly well. Know her by mood and know her by nature. And come it did, only a little less swiftly and surely than his apprehension of its coming.
The first day after, she was simply less communicative, perhaps; a shade less friendly. That was all. It was as if this was the period of germination, the seed at work but unseen as yet. Only a lover's eye could have detected it. And his was a lover's eye, though set in a husband's head.
But by that night, already, a chill was beginning. The temperature of her mood was going down steadily. Her remarks were civil, but in that alone was the gauge. Civility bespeaks distance. Husband and wife should never be civil. Sugared, or soured, but civil not.
By the second day dislike had begun to sprout like a noxious weed, overrunning everything in what was once a pleasant garden. Her eyes avoided him now. To bring them his way he had to make use of the question direct in addressing her, nothing less would do. And even then they refused to linger, as if finding it scarcely worth their while to waste their time on him.
Within but an additional day of that, the weeds had flowered into poisonous, rancid fruit. The cycle of the sowing was complete, all that was needful was the reaping; and who would the scythe wielder be? There was a sharp edge to her tongue now, the velvet was wearing thin in places. The least provocative remark of his might touch one of them, strike a flinty answer.
It was as though this had the better even of her herself; as though, at times, she tried to curb it, make an effort, at intervals, toward relenting, softening: only to find her own nature opposed to her intentions in the matter, and overcoming them in spite of the best she could do. She would smile and the blue ice in her eyes would warm, but only for fleeting minutes; the glacial cast that held her would close over her again and hide her from him.
He took refuge in long walks. They were a surcease, for when he took them he was not without her; when he took them he had her with him as she had been until only lately. He would restore, replenish the old she, until he had her whole again. Then coming back, with a smile and a lighter heart, the two would meet face to face, the old and the new, and in an instant he would have his work all for nothing, the new she had destroyed the old.
"I'll get a job, if this affects you so much," he blurted out at last. "I'm capable, there's no reason why I--"
He met with scant approval.
"I hate a man that works!" she said through tight-gripped teeth. "I could have married a dray horse if I'd wanted that. It'd be just about as dull." Then gave him a cutting look, as if he had no real wish to better their state, were purposely offering her alternatives that were useless, that were not to be seriously considered. "There must be some way besides that, that you could get your hands on some money for us."
He wondered uneasily what she meant by that, and yet was afraid to know, afraid to have it made any clearer.
"Only fools work," she added contemptuously. "Someone once told me that a long time ago, and I believe it now more than ever."
He wondered who, and wondered where he was now. What jail had closed around him long since, or what gallows had met him. Or perhaps he was still unscathed, his creed vindicated, waiting somewhere for word from her, in tacit admission that she had been wrong; knowing that some day, somehow, in his own good time, he would have it.
"He must have been a scalawag," was all he could think to say.
There was defiance in her cold blue eyes. "He was a scalawag," she granted, "but he was good company."
He left the room.
And now there was stone silence between them, following this; not so much as a "By your leave," not so much as a "Good night." It was hideous, it was unthinkable, but it had come about. Two mutes moving about one another, two pantomimists, two sleepless silhouettes in the dimness of their chamber. He sought to reach for her hand and clasp it, but she seemed to be asleep. Yet in her sleep she guessed his intention, and withdrew her hand before he could find it.
On the following day, coming from the back of the hall, he happened to pass by the sitting room, on his way out to take one of his restorative walks, and caught sight of her in there, sitting at the desk. He hadn't known her to be in there. She was not writing a letter, by any evidence that was to be seen. She was sitting quite aimless, quite unoccupied. The desk slab was out, but no paper was in view. Yet for what other purpose do people sit at a desk, he asked himself? There were more appropriate chairs in the room for the purpose, in itself, of sitting.
He had an unhappy feeling that some action she had been engaged in had been hastily resumed as soon as he was gone. The very cast of her countenance told him that; its resolute vacancy. Not a natural vacancy, but a studied one, carefully maintained just for so long as he was in the doorway watching. The pinkey of her hand, which rested sideward along the desk slab, rose and descended again, as he watched. The way the tip of a cat's tail twitches, when all the rest of it is stilled; betraying a leashed, lurking impatience.
There was nothing he could do. If he stopped her this time, she would find another. If he accused, she would deny. If he proved, then her smouldering resentment would burst into open flame, and he didn't want that.
A letter to the past. A letter to that other, subterranean world he thought she had left forever.
He went out and closed the door behind him, heavy hearted.
If there was an added quality to be detected in her, several hours later, on his return, it was a glint of malicious satisfaction, a sort of sneer within the eyes. The look of one who says to herself, I have not been idle. Just wait, and you shall see.
Within another two days he could stand their estrangement no longer, he had capitulated. He had capitulated in a lie; he had prostituted the truth itself to his submission, than which there can be no greater capitulation on the part of one to the desires of another. Making what is not so, so, for the sake of renewed amity.