The Dust Flower - Basil King

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      His look, his tone, conveyed the idea, which penetrated to her mind but slowly. When it did, the surging color became a flush, hot and painful.

      So here it was again, the thing she had been running away from. It had outwitted and outrun her, meeting her again just at the instant when she thought she was shaking it off. She was so indignant with the thing that she almost overlooked the man. She too swung round from her end of the bench, so that they confronted each other, with the length of the seat between them. It was her habit to put things plainly, though now she did it with a burning heart.

      “This is the way you mean it, isn’t it?—you’d go to the devil because you’d married me.”

      The half-minute before he answered was occupied not merely in thinking what to say but in noticing, now that he had her in full-face, that her large, brown irises seemed to be sprinkled with gold dust. Otherwise her appearance struck him simply as blurred, as if 39 it had been brightly enough drawn as to color and line, only rubbed over and defaced by the hand of misery.

      “I don’t want you to get me wrong,” he explained. “It’s not a question of my marrying you in particular. I’ve said I’d marry the first girl I met who’d marry me.”

      The gold-brown eyes scintillated with a thousand tiny stars. “Say, and am I the first?”

      “No; you’re the fourth.” He added, so that she should be under no misconception as to what he was about: “You can take me or leave me. That’s up to you. But if you take me, I want you to understand that it’ll be on a purely business basis.”

      She repeated, as if to memorize the words, “A purely business basis.”

      “Exactly. I’m not looking for a wife. I only want a woman to marry—a woman to whom I can point and say, See there! I’ve married—that.”

      “And that’d be me.”

      “If you undertook the job.”

      “The job of—of bein’ laughed at—jeered at––”

      “I’d be the one who’d be laughed at and jeered at. Nobody would think anything about you. They wouldn’t remember how you looked or know your name. If you got sick of it after a bit, and decided to cut and run, you could do it. I’d see that you were well treated—for the rest of your life.”

      She studied him long and earnestly. “Say, are you crazy?”

      “I’m all on edge, if that’s what you mean. But there’s nothing for you to be afraid of. I shan’t do you any harm at any time.”

      40

      “You only want to do harm to yourself. I’d be like the awful kind o’ pill which a fellow’ll swaller to commit suicide.” She rose, not without a dignity of her own. “Well, mister, if I’m your fourth, I guess you’ll have to look about you for a fifth.”

      “Where are you going?”

      He asked the question without rising. She answered as if her choice of objectives was large.

      “Oh, anywheres.”

      “Which means nowhere, doesn’t it?”

      “Oh, not exactly. It means—it means—the first place I fetch up.”

      “The first place you fetch up may be the police-station, if the things you said just now are true.”

      “The police-station is safe, anyways.”

      “And you think the place I’d take you to wouldn’t be. Well, you’re wrong. It’ll be as safe as a church for as long as you like to stay; and when you want to go—lots of money to go with.”

      Facing away from him toward the city, she said over her shoulder: “There’s things money couldn’t pay you for. Bein’ looked down on is one.”

      She was about to walk on, but he sprang after her, catching her by the sleeve.

      “Look here! Be a sport. You’ve got the chance of your lifetime. It’ll mean no more to you than a part they’d give you in pictures—just a rôle—and pay you a lot better.”

      She was not blind to the advantages he laid before her. True, it might be what she qualified as “bull” to get her into a trap; only she didn’t believe it. This man with the sick mind and anguished face was none 41 of the soft-spoken fiends whose business it is to ensnare young girls. She knew all about them from living with Judson Flack, and couldn’t be mistaken. This fellow might be crazy, but he was what he said. If he said he wouldn’t do her any harm, he wouldn’t. If he said he would pay her well, he would. The main question was as to whether or not, just for the sake of getting something to eat and a place to sleep, she could deliberately put herself in a position in which the man who had married her would have gone to the devil because he had married her.

      As he held her by the sleeve looking down at her, and she, half turned, was looking up at him, this was the battle she was fighting. Hitherto her impulse had been to run away from the scorn of her inferiority; now she was asking herself what would happen if she took up its challenge and fought it on its own ground. What if I do? was the way the question framed itself, but aloud she made it.

      “If I said I would, what would happen first?”

      “We’d go and get a license. Then we’d find a minister. After that I should give you something to eat, and then I’d take you home.”

      “Where would that be?”

      He gave her his address in East Sixty-seventh Street, only a few doors from Fifth Avenue, but her social sophistication was not up to the point of seeing the significance of this. Neither did her imagination try to picture the home or to see it otherwise than as an alternative to the police-station, or worse, as a lodging for the night.

      42

      “And what would happen to me when I got to your home?”

      “You’d have your own room. I shouldn’t interfere with you. You’d hardly ever see me. You could stay as long as you liked or as short as you liked, after the first week or two.”

      There was that about him which carried conviction. She believed him. As an alternative to having nowhere to go, what he offered her was something, and something with that spice of adventure of which she had been dreaming only a few minutes earlier. She couldn’t be worse off than she was now, and if it gave her the chance of a hand-to-hand tussle with the world-pride which had never done anything but look down on her, she would be fighting what she held as her worst enemy. She braced herself to say,

      “All right; I’ll do it.”

      He, too, braced himself. “Very well! Let’s start.”

      The impetuosity of his motion almost took her breath away as she tried to keep pace with him.

      “By the way, what’s your name?” he asked, before they reached Fifth Avenue.

      She told him, but was too overwhelmed with what she had undertaken to dare to ask him his.

      43

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      “Nao!”

      The strong cockney negative was also an exclamation. It came from Mrs. Courage, the cook-housekeeper, who stood near the kitchen range making the coffee for breakfast. She was a woman who looked her name, born not merely to do battle, but to enjoy being in the midst of it.

      Jane, the waitress, was the next to speak. “Nettie Duckett, you ought to be ashymed to sye them words, you that’s been taught to ’ope the best of

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