A Little Treachery

20

‘I shall offer to take the little boy, Emmy, since you don’t mind,’ Catherine announced the next morning. She had just spread her writing materials on the table in the garden room, and she turned her head to look at Emmy through the half-open door between that room and the kitchen.

The young woman was standing in the centre of the little kitchen, and Catherine caught a sudden kindled, significant look on her face which for a moment she could not read.

‘Good, good. Ha!’ said Emmy deeply.

There was a full-bodied quality about Emmy’s voice. It was a decidedly individual voice, unexpectedly low-pitched and strong, and it made a piquant combination with the girl’s general light-weight appearance and sparkling looks. Only, rather too well one could imagine for it a natural development into the rich, coarse contralto of the comedienne.

‘You’ve no objection, Emmy?’ she said, a little at a loss.

‘No objection at all, dear,’ Emmy returned, with a demure pursing of the comical mouth; and then said dreamily, ‘Ah, so we’ve got him now, friend Hungerford!’ And she gave as if to herself a wicked roll of the eye. This Catherine viewed through the doorway in some uncertainty.

Suddenly, startlingly, in the throaty and coarsened voice she used for singing, the girl burst into an idiotic ditty of which these words were the chief feature:

‘He shall die! He shall die . . . ie! He shall die . . .’

But Catherine stopped her, crying hastily, laughingly, ‘Emmy – don’t!’ She was half ashamed, the next instant, of her tone of protest, for she said to herself that it was a mere nervous folly to derive such a shock and thrill from a little bit of cheerful clowning. Or was its funny savagery actually a shade too realistic? Emmy’s anticking had such zest, such vigour; it parodied earnestness too closely. Besides, as Catherine realized, abruptly enlightened, that throaty voice was an intoxicant.

So it was an intoxicant? Well and good.

With a sense of something there better not investigated, a little flustered, saying she must give her mind to her letter, she sat down at the table. She turned with heaviness to the making up of an answer to a kind and sympathetic woman who was one of her own sort, who was one of Clem’s sort, who belonged to the old life she could no longer face, the atmosphere of which she could hardly breathe – one between whom and herself the tragedy lay openly in all its horror, not to be avoided. She must write decently to Margaret this time, with the liking and gratitude she really felt, while longing to put, ‘Leave me alone, I do beg of you! Why can’t you leave me alone?’ She answered briefly.

But when she came to the query about Simon, she leaned back and called out to Emmy, ‘I’m relying a lot on you, you know. I’m not, I believe, a very fit person to have charge of a child.’

‘Why? Don’t you like kids?’ Emmy sang back jollily from the sink, where she was splashing away at a bit of washing.

Catherine smiled, as if at a thought of her own, and then confessed, ‘Well, I’m afraid of them. When I hear a child’s voice raised a bit riotously, I feel vilely frightened.’

‘Oh, those little devils up on the road have got on your nerves, that’s all it is. Don’t let it throw you.’

Emmy took a towel and came to sit on the edge of the table while drying her hands, and on Catherine’s saying that, should the child come, it looked as if she would have to make up a bed every night in the middle room, ‘Lord,’ Emmy cried, surprised, ‘can’t he have a shake-down with me, that baby?’ So it was arranged. Then Catherine went on to foresee the many alterations in their ways which would be necessary; Emmy carelessly agreeing to everything, while being lively and full of sly allusions to certain persons in one’s power.

Catherine ended by laughing.

Did she, then, not see what this young woman was? She saw very clearly. A young woman of much levity of disposition and of no principles. A young woman often exceedingly lax and coarse even in her talk – only it all went with such good humour, such amiability and obligingness. A young woman whose feelings were vitiated by the false theatre-spirit, whose manners and very looks were spoiled by the affectations of the stage, and had that meaningless overemphasis which the everlasting aping of emotion brings. Whatever came of such falsities of manner and feeling, it could hardly be a love of truth.

Sometimes, when attending to the girl’s room, she would come upon some indication of a squalid taste and vulgarity of spirit, some tell-tale sign left carelessly exposed perhaps simply in ignorance of its offence. Repugnant to Catherine all such details invariably were; and then indeed she would pause and stand considering in deep astonishment what it could be which made this young woman not only tolerable to her but so supremely seductive that she trembled at the thought of losing her.

But only at scattered moments did she still try to account for the pleasure she took in the girl’s company. She was keenly diverted by those stories of stage and near-underworld which Emmy could tell her; and she felt no concern because it was plainly a stage of those lowest levels where all kinds of shoddy bohemianism ran together, as into a sink, where a riff-raff of actor and artist and journalist seemed to merge into a cheerful, ugly, mongrel crowd the fixed characteristic of which was lawlessness. For it skirted the criminal world and mingled with it here and there. Not that Emmy’s stories gave any distinct views of this – though indeed they often had the air of being edited for the hearer’s benefit. But it was a world of disorder, that was clear; sharply amusing, highly various, light of heart and conscience, and, generally, of a large, sprawling good-nature which, having some cheap semblance of a heart in it, sweetened the mixture.

But it was not, of course, that shallow admiration a young person might have felt for the slick, underworld type which affected her; it was an obscure feeling of being in the same plight as those who made war on authority.

It seemed hardly fair to consider Emmy quite of this crowd, Catherine told herself in her more sober moments. It was not as if she was like the lighter young women of the stage with their matter-of-fact mingling of two professions, or she had not yet become so. She was a worker, in the real sense of the word, and a grim hard worker when facts compelled her to be; and facts usually did. She lived, as far as Catherine could tell, entirely by her own efforts. Not only that. She assisted or kept others, by her own account. And to her disreputable family, in spite of much loud and decisive criticism of its various members, it was plain that she was fanatically loyal.

Nevertheless a girl who was the product of a life of disorders and everyday intemperance not even to be imagined by those of Catherine’s world, of the Hungerfords’ world. A creature light and worthless as a straw, who had been carried inconsequently to that ‘bad spot’ – had been carried there, sucked there, like a morsel of street refuse into a gutter.

But Catherine, though perceiving all this, did not now admit it to her counsels – did not care it it was so.

For good or ill, here was the companion she proposed for the little cherished Simon.