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Treasure and Trouble Therewith by Geraldine Bonner

G >> Geraldine Bonner >> Treasure and Trouble Therewith




To his intense relief Fong picked it up, dropped it into the pocket of
his blouse, and without a word turned and left the room.

No one had noticed the little scene. When Mayer came back the group was
on its feet, Mark having made a move to go.

There were handshakes and good-nights, and Burrage and Lorry moved
forward up the long room. Aunt Ellen took the opportunity of slipping
through a side door that led to the hall, and Chrystie and her lover
faced each other among the empty chairs.

With his eye on the receding backs of the other couple, Mayer said,
hardly moving his lips:

"When can I see you again? Tomorrow at the Greek Church at four?"

She demurred as she constantly did. At each station in the clandestine
courtship he had the same struggle with the same faltering uncertainty.
But, after tonight, the time for humoring her moods was past. What he had
endured during the last hour showed in a haggard intensity of expression,
a subdued, fierce urgence of manner. Chrystie looked at him and looked
away, almost afraid of him. He was staring at her with an avid waiting as
if ready to drag the answer out of her lips. She fluttered like a bird
under the snake's hypnotic eye.

"I can't," she whispered; "I'm going out with Lorry."

"Then when?'

"Oh, Boye, I don't know--I have so many things to do."

He had difficulty in pinning her down to a date, but finally succeeded
five days off. In his low-toned insistence he used a lover's language,
terms of endearment, tender phrases, but her timorous reluctance roused a
passion of rage in him. He would have liked to shake her; he would have
liked to swear at her as he had at Fong.




CHAPTER XXI

A WOMAN SCORNED


After the conversation with Crowder, Pancha was very quiet for several
days. She spoke only the necessary word, came and went with feline
softness, performed her duties with the precision of a mechanism. Her
stillness had a curious quality of detachment; she seemed held in a
spell, her eye, suddenly encountered, blank and vacant; even her voice
was toneless. She reacted to nothing that went on around her.

All her vitality had withdrawn to feed the inner flame. Under that dead
exterior fires blazed so high and hot that the shell containing them was
empty of all else. They had burned away pride and reason and conscience;
they were burning to explosive outbreak. The girl had no consciousness of
it; she only felt their torment and with the last remnant of her will
tried to hide her anguish. Then came a day when the shell cracked and the
fires burst through.

Unable to bear her own thoughts, weakened by two sleepless nights, she
telephoned to the Argonaut Hotel and said she wanted to speak to Mr.
Mayer. The switchboard girl answered that he was in and asked for her
name. On Pancha's refusal to give it, the girl had crisply replied that
Mr. Mayer had left orders no one was to speak with him unless he knew
the name. Pancha gave it and waited. Presently the answer came--"Very
sorry, Mr. Mayer doesn't seem to be there--thought he was in, but I
guess I was wrong."

This falsehood, contemptuously transparent, act of final dismissal, was
the blow that broke the shell and let the fire loose. Such shreds of
pride and self-respect as remained to the wretched girl were shriveled.
She put on her hat and coat, and tying a thick veil over her face, went
across town to the Argonaut Hotel.

It was the day after Mayer had met Mark at the Alstons'. He too had not
slept, had had a horrible, harassing night. All day he had sat in his
rooms going over the scene, recalling the young man's face, assuring
himself of its unconsciousness. But he was upset, jarred, his security
gone. Luxury had corroded his already wasted and overdrawn forces; the
habits of idleness weakened his power to resist. One fact stood out in
his mind--he must carry the courtship with Chrystie to its conclusion,
and arrange for their elopement. Sprawled in the armchair or pacing off
the space from the bedroom door to the window he planned it. One or two
more interviews with her would bring her to the point of consent, then
they would slip away to Nevada; he would marry her there and they would
go on to New York. It ought not to take more than a week, at the longest
ten days. If he had had any other woman to deal with--not this spiritless
fool of a girl--he could manage it in a much shorter time. All he had to
do was to make a last trip to Sacramento and get what was left of the
money and that could be done in a day.

A knock at the door made him start. Any sound would have made him start
in the state he was in, and a knock called up nightmare visions of
Burrage, police officers, Lorry Alston--there was no end to his alarms.
Then he reassured himself--a package or the room boy with towels--and
called out "Come in."

At the first glance he did not know who it was. Like a woman in a novel
a female, closely veiled, entered without greeting and closed the door.
When she raised the veil and he saw it was Pancha Lopez he was at once
relieved and exasperated. Her manner did not tend to remove his
irritation. Leaning against the table, her face very white, she looked
at him without speaking. Had not the sight of her just then been
extremely unwelcome, the melodrama of the whole thing--the veil, the
pallid face, the dramatic silence--would have amused him. As it was he
looked anything but amused, rising from the armchair, his brows drawn
together in an ugly frown.

"What on earth brings you here?" was his greeting.

"You," she answered.

Her voice, husky and breathless, matched the rest of the crazy
performance. He saw an impending scene, and under his anger had a
feeling of grievance. This was more than he deserved. He gave her an
ironical bow.

"That's very flattering, I'm sure, and I'm highly honored. But, my dear
Pancha, pardon me if I say I don't like it. It's not my custom to see
ladies up here."

"Don't talk like that to me, Boye," she said, the huskiness of her tone
deepening. "Don't put on style and act like you didn't know me. We're
past that."

He shrugged.

"Answer for yourself, Pancha. Believe me, I'm not at all past conforming
to the usages of civilized people." He had moved back to the fireplace,
and leaning against the mantel waited for her to reply. As she did not do
so, he said, "Let me repeat, I don't like your coming here."

Her eyes, level and fixed, were disconcerting. To avoid them he turned to
the mantel and took up a cigarette and matches lying there.

"Then why don't you come to see me?" she said.

"Teh--Teh!" He put the cigarette between his teeth and struck the match
on the shelf. "Haven't I told you I'm busy?"

"Yes, you've _told_ me that."

"Well?"

"You've told me lies."

"Thank you." He was occupied lighting the cigarette.

"Why, when I telephoned an hour ago and gave my name, did you say you
were out?"

He affected an air of forbearance.

"Because I happened to be out."

"Boye, that's another lie."

He threw the match into the fireplace and turned his eyes on her full of
a steely dislike.

"Look here, Pancha. You've bothered me a lot lately, calling me up,
nagging at me about things I couldn't help. I'm not the kind of man that
likes that; I'm not the kind that stands it. I've been a friend of yours
and hope to stay so, but--"

She cut him off, her voice trembling with passion.

"_Friend_--you a friend! _You_ who do nothing but put me off with
lies--who are trying to shake me, throw me away like an old shoe!"

Her restraint was gone. With her shoulders raised and her chin thrust
forward, the thing she had been, and still was--child of the lower
depths, bred in its ways--was revealed to him. It made him afraid of her,
seeing possibilities he had not grasped before. What he had thought to be
harmless and powerless might become one more menacing element in the
dangers that surrounded him. His natural caution put a check upon his
anger. He tried to speak with a soothing good humor.

"Now, my dear girl, don't talk like that. It's not true in the first
place, it's stupid in the second, and in the third it only tends to make
bad feeling between us that there's no cause for."

"Oh, yes, there's cause, lots of cause."

He found her steady eyes more discomfiting than ever, and looking at his
cigarette said:

"Panchita, you're not yourself. You're overworked and overwrought,
imagining things that don't exist. Instead of standing there slanging me
you ought to go home and take a rest."

She paid no attention to this suggestion, but suddenly, moving
nearer, said:

"What did you do it for, Boye?"

"Do what?"

"Make love to me--make me think you loved me. Why did you come? Why did
you say what you did? Why did you kiss me? Why, when you saw the way I
felt, did you keep on? What good was it to you?"

To gain a moment's time, and to hide his face from her haggard gaze, he
turned and put the cigarette carefully on the stand of the matchsafe. He
found it difficult to keep the soothing note in his voice.

"Why--why--why? I don't see any need for these questions? What _did_ I
do? A kiss! What's that? And you talk as if I'd ceased to care for you.
Of course I haven't. I always will. I don't know anyone I think more of
than I do of you. That's why I want you to go. You don't look well, and
as I told you before, it's not the right thing for you to be here."

She was beside him and he laid his hand on her arm, gentle and
persuasive. She snatched the arm away, and with a small, feeble fist
struck him in the chest and gasped out an epithet of the people.

For a still moment they stood looking at one another. Both faces showed
that bitterest of antagonisms--the hate of one-time lovers. She saw it
in his and it increased her desperation, he in her's, and in the uprush
of his anger he forgot his fear. She spoke first, her voice low, her
breathing loud on the room's stillness.

"You could fool me once, but it's too late now. There's no coming over me
any more with soft talk."

"Then I'll not try it. Take it from me straight. I've come to the end of
my patience. I've had enough of you and your exactions."

"Oh, you needn't tell me _that_," she cried. "I know it, and I know why.
I know the secret of _your_ change of heart, Mr. Boye Mayer."

She saw the alarm in his face, the sudden arrested attention.

"What are you talking about?" he said, too startled to feign
indifference.

"Oh, you thought no one was on," she cried, backing away from him, "but
_I_ was. I've been for the past month. Four hundred thousand dollars!
Think of it, Boye! You're getting on in the world. Some difference
between that and an actress at the Albion."

If Pancha had still cherished a hope that she might have been mistaken,
the sight of Mayer's rage would have extinguished it. He made a step
toward her, hard-eyed, pale as she was.

"You're mad. That's what's the matter with you. I might have known it
when you came. Now go--I don't want any lunatics here."

She stood her ground and tried to laugh, a horrible sound.

"You don't even like me to know that. Won't even share a secret with
me--me, the friend that you care for so much."

"Go!" he thundered and pointed to the door.

"Not till I hear more, I'm curious. Is it just the money, or would you
like the lady even if she hadn't any?"

Exasperated beyond reason he made a pounce at her and caught her by the
arm. This time his grasp was too strong for her to shake off. His fingers
closed on the slender stem and closing shook it.

"Since you won't go, I'll have to help you," he breathed in his fury.

She squirmed in his grip, trying to pull his fingers away with her free
hand, and in this humiliating fashion felt herself drawn toward the door.
It was the last consummate insult, his superior strength triumphing. If
he had loosed her she would have gone, but anything he did she was bound
to resist, most of all his hand upon her. That, once the completest
comfort, was now the crowning ignominy.

As he pushed her, short sentences of savage hostility flashed between
them, sparks struck from a mutual hate. Hers betrayed the rude beginnings
she had tried to hide, his the falseness of his surface finish. It was as
if for the first time they had established a real understanding. At
grips, filled with fury, they attained a sudden intimacy, the hidden self
of each at last plain to the other.

The scene was interrupted in an unexpected and ridiculous manner--the
telephone rang. As the bell whirred he stopped irresolute, his fingers
tight on her arm. Then, as it rang again, he looked at her with a sort of
enraged helplessness, and made a movement to draw her to the phone. An
outsider would have laughed, but the two protagonists were beyond comedy,
and glared at one another in dumb defiance. Finally, the bell filling the
room with its clamor, there was nothing for it but to answer. With grim
lips and a murderous eye on his opponent, Mayer dropped her arm, and
going to the phone, took down the receiver. From the other end,
plaintive and apologetic, came Chrystie's voice.

Pancha retreated to the door, opened it and came to a halt on the sill.
Out of the corner of his eye he was aware of her watching him, a baleful
figure. He feared to employ the tenderness of tone necessary in his
conversations with Chrystie, and as he listened and made out that she
wanted to break her next engagement, he turned and fastened a gorgon's
glance on the woman in the doorway, jerking his head in a gesture of
dismissal.

She answered it with ominous quiet, "When I've finished. I've just one
more thing to say."

In desperation he turned to the mouthpiece and said as softly as he
dared:

"Wait a minute. The window's open and I can't hear. I must shut it," then
put the receiver against his chest and muttered:

"Do you want me to kill you?"

"Not yet--after I get square you can. I won't care then what you do. But
I've got to get square and I'm going to. There's Indian in me and that's
the blood that doesn't forget. And there's something else you don't
know--yes, there _was_ something I never told you. I've someone to fight
my fights and hit my enemies, and if I can't get you, they can. Watch
out and see."

She retreated, closing the door. Mayer had to resume his conversation
with the blood drumming in his ears, uplift Chrystie's flagging spirit,
and shift their engagement to another day. When it was over he fell on
the sofa, limp and exhausted. He lay there till dinner time, thinking
over what Pancha had said, and what she could do, assuring himself it was
only bluff, the impotent threatenings of a discarded woman. He felt
certain that the champion she had alluded to was her one-time admirer,
the bandit. This being the case, there was nothing to be feared from
him, in hiding in the wilderness. It would be many a day before he'd
venture forth. But the girl herself, full of venom, burning with the
sense of her wrongs, was a new factor in the perils of his position.
Stronger now than ever was this conviction that he must hurry his schemes
to their climax.




CHAPTER XXII

THEREBY HANGS A TALE


That same evening the audience at the Albion had a disappointment. At
half past eight the manager appeared before the curtain and said that
Miss Lopez was ill and could not appear. As they all knew, she had been
an unremitting worker, had given them of her best, and in her love of her
art and her public had worn herself out and suffered a nervous breakdown.
A week or two of rest would restore her, and meantime her place would be
taken by Miss Lottie Vere.

The audience, not knowing what was expected of them, applauded and then
looked at one another in aggrieved surprise. They felt rather peevish,
for they had come to regard Pancha Lopez as a permanent institution
devised for their amusement. They no more expected her to fail them than
the clock in the Ferry Tower to be wrong. Charlie Crowder heard it at the
_Despatch_ office next morning--Mrs. Wesson, who picked up local news
like a wireless, met him on the stairs and told him.

"I'm glad she's given in at last," said the good-natured society
reporter. "She's been running down hill for the past month, and if she'd
kept on much longer she'd have run to the place where you jump off."

That afternoon Crowder went round to see her. There was no use phoning,
the Vallejo was still in that archaic stage where the only telephone was
in the lower hall and guests were called to it by the clerk. Besides, you
never could tell about a girl like Pancha; she was half a savage, liable
to lie curled up in a corner and never think of a doctor.

He found her on the sofa in her sitting-room, a box of crackers and a
bottle of milk on the table, a ragged Navajo blanket over her feet. When
she saw who it was she sat up with a cry of welcome, her wrapper falling
loose from her brown neck. She looked very ill, her eyes dark-circled and
sunken in her wasted face.

He sat beside her on the sofa's edge--she was so thin there was plenty
of room--and taking her hand held it while he tried to hide the concern
that seized him. After the first sentence of greeting she fell back on
the crumpled pillow, and lay still, the little flicker of animation
dying out.

"Well, well, Panchita," he said, patting her hand, a kindly awkward
figure hunched up in his big overcoat; "this is something new for you."

She made an agreeing movement with her head, her glance resting where it
fell, too languid to move.

"I seem to be all in," she murmured.

"Just played out?"

"Looks that way."

"I didn't know till this morning--Mrs. Wesson told me. How did it
happen?"

"I don't know, I got all weak. It was last night."

"At the theater?"

"No, here, in my room. I kept feeling worse and worse, but I thought I
could pull through. And then I knew I couldn't and I got down to the
phone some way and told them. And then I came back here and--I don't
know--I sort of broke to pieces."

As she completed the sentence tears suddenly welled into her eyes and
began to run, unchecked, in shining drops down her cheeks. She drew her
hand from Crowder's and turning on her side placed it and its fellow
over her face and wept, a river of tears that came softly without sobs.
Crowder was overwhelmed. He had never thought his friend could be so
broken, never had imagined her weak as other women, bereft of her
gallant pride.

"Oh, Pancha," he said, unutterably distressed, "you poor girl! I'm so
sorry, I'm so awfully sorry." He crooned over her in his rough man's
tenderness, stroking her hair. "You've worked yourself to the bone. You
ought to have given in sooner, you've kept it up too long."

Her voice came smothered through the shielding hands:

"It's not that, Charlie, it's not that."

This surprised him exceedingly. That any other cause than overwork could
so reduce her had never occurred to him. Had she some ailment--some
hidden suffering--preying on her? He thought of the Indian's stoicism and
was filled with apprehension.

"Well, then, what is it?" he asked. "Are you ill?"

She moved her head in silent negation.

"But if it isn't work, it must be something. A girl as strong as you
doesn't collapse without a reason."

She dropped her hands and sat up. Her face was brought on a level
with his, the swollen eyes blinking through tears, the mouth twisted
and pitiful.

"It's pain, it's pain, Charlie," she quavered.

"Then you _are_ sick," he said, now thoroughly alarmed.

"No--it's not my body, it's my heart. It's here." She clasped her hands
over her heart, and suddenly closing her eyes rocked back and forth. "A
little while ago I was so happy. I never was like that before--every
minute of the day lovely. And then it was all changed, it all ended. I
couldn't believe it. I wouldn't believe it. I kept saying 'it'll come all
right, nothing so awful could happen to anyone.' But it could--it did.
And it's that that's made me this way--to be so full of joy and then to
have it snatched away. It's too much, Charlie. Even I couldn't stand
it--I who once thought nothing could beat me."

Crowder had had a wide experience in exhibitions of human suffering, but
he had never seen anything quite like this. Tenderness was not what was
needed, and, his eyes stern on her working face, he said with quiet
authority:

"Pancha, I don't get what this means. Now, like a good girl, tell me.
I've got to know."

Then and there, without more urging, she told him.

She told her story truthfully as far as she went, but she did not go to
the end. All the preceding night, the interview with Mayer, had repeated
itself in her memory, bitten itself in in every brutal detail. Hate
trailed after it a longing to repay in kind and she saw herself impotent.
The threat of her father's championship, snatched at in blind rage, she
knew meant nothing, the boast of "getting square" was empty. Subtlety was
her only weapon and now in her confession to Crowder she employed it.
What she told of Mayer's conduct was true, but she did not tell what to
her was a mitigating circumstance--the counter-attraction of Chrystie.
The lure of money was to this child of poverty an excuse for her lover's
desertion. Even Crowder, her friend, might condone a transfer of
affection from Pancha Lopez to the daughter of George Alston. So the
young man, hearing the story ended, saw Mayer as Pancha intended him
to--a blackguard, breaking a girl's heart for pastime.

"The dog!" he muttered. "The cur! Why didn't you tell me? I'd have sized
him up for you."

"I believed him, I thought it was true. And I was afraid you'd
interfere--tell me it was all wrong."

The young man shifted his eyes from her face and stifled a comment. It
was no time now to reproach her. There was a moment's silence and then
she broke out into the query, put so often to herself, put to Mayer,
tormenting and inexplicable.

"Why did he do it--why did he begin it? It was he who came, sought me
out, gave me flowers. He'd come whenever I'd let him--and he was so
interested, couldn't hear enough about me. There wasn't any little thing
in my life he didn't want to know. Every man who'd ever come near me he'd
want me to tell him about, he'd just _hound_ me to tell him. What made
him do it? Was it all a fake from the beginning, and if it was did he do
it just for sport?"

Crowder had no answer for these plaints. He was deeply moved, shocked and
indignant, more than he let her see. "An ugly business, a d----d ugly
business," he growled, his honest face overcast with sympathy, his hand,
big and not over clean, lying on hers.

"Never mind, old girl," he said; "we'll pull you out, we'll get you on
your feet again. We've got to do that before we turn our attention to
him. I guess he's got a weak spot and I'll find it before I'm done. Who
is he, anyway--where does he come from--what's he doing here? He's too
d----d reserved to come out well in the wash. You keep still and leave
the rest to me. I'm not your old pal for nothing."

But his encouragement met with no response. Her heart unburdened, she
lapsed into apathy and dropped back on the pillow, her spurt of
energy over.

He lighted the light and tried to make her eat, but she pushed away the
glass of milk he offered and begged him to let her be. So there was
nothing for it but to make her as comfortable as he could, draw the table
to her side, straighten the Navajo blanket and get another pillow from
the bedroom. Tomorrow morning he would send in a doctor and on his way
out stop at the office and leave a message for the chambermaid to look in
on her during the evening. She answered his good-by with a nod and a
slight, twisted smile, the first he had seen on her face.

"Lord!" he thought as he closed the door, "she looks half dead. How I'd
like to get my hooks into that man!"

Downstairs he gave the clerk instructions and left a tip for the
chambermaid--a doctor would come in the morning and he would look in
himself in the course of the day. She was to want for nothing; if there
was any expense he'd be responsible. On the way up the street he bought
fruit, magazines and the evening papers and ordered them sent to her.

The next morning he found time to drop into the Argonaut Hotel for a chat
with Ned Murphy. The chat, touching lightly on the business of the place,
drifted without effort to Mr. Mayer, always to Ned Murphy, an engaging
topic. Crowder went away not much the wiser. Mayer, if a little offish,
was as satisfactory a guest as any hotel could ask for--paid his bill
weekly, always in gold, gave no trouble, and lived pretty quiet and
retired, only now and then going to the country on business. What the
business was Ned Murphy didn't know--he'd been off five times now,
leaving in the morning and coming back the next day. But he wasn't the
kind to talk--you couldn't get next him. It was evident that Ned Murphy
took a sort of proprietary pride in the stately unapproachableness of the
star lodger.

In the shank of the afternoon, Crowder, at work in the city room, was
called to the phone. The person speaking was Mark Burrage and his
communication was mysterious and urgent. The night before, in a curious
and unexpected manner, he had received some information of a deeply
interesting nature upon which he wanted to consult Crowder. Would Crowder
meet him at Philip's Rotisserie that evening at seven and arrange to come
to his room afterward for an hour? The matter was important, and Crowder
must hustle and fix it if it could be done. Crowder said it could, and,
shut off from further parley by an abrupt "So long," was left wondering.

Scottish book of the year goes to Kieron Smith, Boy by James Kelman

The barrister Constance Briscoe has won the libel case brought against her by her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell, over her bestselling misery memoir Ugly, in which she accused Briscoe-Mitchell of childhood cruelty and neglect.

Briscoe-Mitchell claimed the allegations were "a piece of fiction", and sued Briscoe and her publishers Hodder & Stoughton for libel.

A 10-day hearing at the high court in London concluded earlier today with a unanimous verdict from the jury after more than a day's deliberation. Speaking outside the court, Briscoe, a part-time judge, said she was "very happy" with the verdict.

"It is sad that my mother still feels the need to pursue me. Now I just want to get on with my career," she said. "I can quite understand why my family went into collective denial, but whilst child abuse may be committed behind closed doors, it should never be swept under the carpet."

The hearing saw Briscoe tell Mr Justice Tugendhat and a jury how her mother beat her with a stick for wetting the bed, called her a "dirty little whore" and drove her to attempt suicide by drinking bleach.

Briscoe's account of her upbringing was published in 2006 and has sold more than 400,000 copies in the UK.

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Would you have your ashes scattered in Jane Austen's garden?
American film producer to publish version of the Bible in which God says it is better to be gay than straight

The royal family doesn't need a poet

The power of Jane Austen never ceases to amaze: the myriad film and TV adaptations, the biopics, the spin-off self-help books, the novels about Austen book clubs and Austen obsessives and even, next spring, the publication of a book about "how Jane Austen conquered the world" (Jane's Fame, by Clare Harman). And now comes the just-too-weird story that deceased fans of Jane Austen have been banned from having their ashes scattered in her garden. In a letter to the Jane Austen Society, Louise West, the collections manager of Jane Austen's House Museum, wrote: "While we understand many admirers of Jane Austen would love to have ashes laid here, it is something we do not allow. It is distressing for visitors to see mounds of human ash, particularly so for our gardener. Also, it is of no benefit to the garden!" (Or is it? Surely a small quantity of fresh ashes judiciously placed beneath a hydrangea bush is just the ticket?)

Anyway, leaving aside the Gardeners' Question Time minutiae, what on earth is going on here? I like an Austen novel as much as the next person – I probably reread my way through the complete works every couple of years – but I am baffled as to why one would want to be laid to rest among the flowerbeds of Chawton. The only explanation is the currently unstoppable power of the Austen cult, fuelled by Colin Firth in a wet blouse, by Andrew Davies's adaptations, and by Hollywood. I'm all for enjoying books, but the cult of Austen has reached ridiculous proportions. In a post-feminist world that should know better, she seems to be adored as the comforting provider of romantic, happy-endings nonsense instead of the sharp and acerbic social satirist she deserves to be seen as.

(Does anyone actually believe her, by the way, when she foretells a happy marriage for Darcey and Elizabeth? I fear a woman as interesting as Elizabeth would be sorely disappointed with this standard-issue British Repressed Public-school Man - hopeless emotionally, and probably hopeless in bed.)

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