RHODA FAIR: The Classic Novel of a Woman at the Crossroads

by Clarence Budingtion Kelland

  RHODA FAIR

  The Classic Novel of a Woman at the Crossroads

  Clarence Budington Kelland

  A Digital Parchment Services publication

  ISBN 1588730093

  Serialized in Ladies’ Home Journal 1925-26. Copyright Clarence Budington Kelland 25.

  Copyright renewed 1970.

  First published in book form Harper & Row 1926.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

  Published under license the estate of Clarence Budington Kelland.

  Note: Because English is a living language, it experiences continual change and evolution. Spelling, punctuation and construction have changed in many respects in the 60 years since this novel was written. We have made every effort to preserve the author’s original text in order to give some hint of the flavor of the times.

  First U.S. paperback edition.

  THE FANTASIES OF CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

  RHODA FAIR: A woman with a cursed soul meets an ancient magician in a land of mysticism and mystery

  MIRACLE: A man blinded by an enemy searches North America for fabled place of power and a legendary cure

  BACKBONE: Lovers reincarnated only to battle the evil forces that separated them 200 years earlier

  30 PIECES OF SILVER: Where did the coins come from, what was their meaning?

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter One

  RHODA FAIR was dead.

  It was the passing of a legendary figure, of a woman storied, romantic, unique; it was the ultimate adventure of an adventurous soul whose material name had been for a generation a household word, not only in America, her birthplace and the land she called her home, but in continental capitals where not the least renowned of her coups had stirred Scotland Yard and the Sûreté to exasperation and grudging admiration. . . . For Rhoda Fair, in her day, had been the cleverest confidence woman in the world.

  No newspaper in the land was too great to chronicle the quiet death of this slender, bright-eyed, gray-haired woman; no newspaper was too small or too remote to give room to the event. For a day her biography was the feature of the news—and it signifies something in his restless, cynical hour that no writer dealt with her otherwise than kindly, sympathetically. But it would have been more than human had the chief interest not resided in those all but legendary exploits of hers, in those floutings of the police of four continents and in the whimsicalities of her evil-doing. Rhoda Fair! Whole nations had laughed with her—never at her—and whole nations had waited with anticipatory tongue in cheek when she announced her abandonment of the old ways and her resolve to undertake the humdrum, honest, property-respecting, bourgeois, law-abiding life. It was one of Rhoda's tricks, and the dénoûment was awaited as one awaits the climax of the third act. But there was no dénoûment.

  With Tom Fair, her husband, ci-devant king of predatory bank specialists, she took up her residence in a respectable but not opulent quarter of a mid-Western city and undertook the most difficult task of her life—which was nothing less than the winning of her neighbors. How well she succeeded is testified by the number of mourners who crowded the little church; by the expressed pride of those neighbors that for twenty years they had lived side by side with her. It was a triumphant death.

  For five years she held Tom Fair straight as she held herself, and then he died, leaving her, not lonely, for there was a daughter, but with memories and tenderness, for despite their profession there had been love between her and Tom Fair which might have shamed many a stainless couple.

  It was then, after the dulling of her first grief, that she entered the world of business, and prospered. With the intellect which was her endowment she could not but prosper. She chose the field of real-estate investment, or speculation, if you will, buying and selling, studying growths and needs, so that a decade before the end she could sign a statement truthfully showing her the possessor of a quarter of a million. This, little by little, she withdrew from land and placed in securities, for she was looking ahead and thinking of the daughter who was her legacy from Tom—and the sum continued to increase, so that, on the day she died, she might with some fairness be called a wealthy woman.

  But, strangely enough, she did not sever the old connections nor deny the old friends. The days of her past she never strove to conceal nor to minimize, and was wont to discuss them casually and without embarrassment as another woman would speak of her days in boarding-school. There was no sham in the make-up of Rhoda Fair. Queer people appeared at her house surreptitiously and never were denied welcome, food, or—in stress—money with which to purchase distance. She was friend, confidante, adviser, to the underworld of a continent, but in herself rectitude and honor and obedience to the minutest letter of the law were never questioned . . . with one possible exception! It may be that Rhoda was more than once accessory after the fact, if lending aid and comfort to some hard-pressed fugitive be accessoryship.

  Strange meetings took place in her house and Rhoda and the community enjoyed them, as when, upon an afternoon, the pastor of the little Methodist church which had not been ashamed to accept her benefactions made the friendly call of habit. He found in the pleasant sitting-room a man of middle age who might have been a clerk or a conductor, who arose as he entered, and shot a quick, questioning glance at Mrs. Fair, who smiled impishly.

  "Mr. Pierce," said she, "I want you to know Peter Greig. Best man with a modern safe in America. He doesn't meet many ministers in his line of work."

  It is of record that Mr. Pierce spent an entertaining and profitable afternoon and went away with an altered idea of the personality of sinners—and with much interesting information upon the higher technique of safe-cracking imparted by the tongue of a savant in that intricate art.

  As for little Rhoda Fair, she had been dandled upon the knee of philanthropists and of pickpockets, and no concealment had been practiced toward her from the day of her birth onward. Her mother was wise; she saw to it there never should have to come a day of reckoning and of confession—when little Rhoda should come crying home to demand if this or that gibe of malicious playmate were truth. Instead, the truth was permitted to become commonplace; she grew up in its consciousness, and her age was well along before she saw any appreciable difference between a groceryman and a peterman. Which was not without its elements of danger.

  One of the most sought after counterfeiters in the land she called "Uncle Billy" and loved him because of the perfection with which he could imitate the voices of animals. But, while individuals were much alike to her, she was taught in no unmistakable terms to differentiate between actions. It was a queer jumble, and resulted in some confusion. A man or woman might be loved, as indivi
duals they might not be at all objectionable—or even might be admirable—but their mode of gaining a livelihood was reprehensible. Mrs. Fair was not fond of the word "wickedness." To her wickedness meant something other than invasions of property rights, something different from stealing or counterfeiting or smuggling. Wickedness was a matter of the heart. A man who never broke the law might be a wicked man—a man who lived by continual warfare with the law might do wrong, but he need not be wicked. There were things you should not do, and things you must not do, and little Rhoda learned to recognize the difference between them. She must not be cruel, she must not break faith or lie or betray a confidence or a friend, because these things were wicked. She ought not to pick a pocket or imitate a coin, because these things were wrong and inadvisable. It is fortunate she was of a quick and perceptive intelligence, or great confusion might have resulted. . . . In any event, it was not what one would term a normal upbringing, though there are those who could utter much in its favor from the standpoint of higher humanism.

  But for all her mother's wisdom and love and care a time was to come when the child realized she differed from her playmates. She differed from them in name. This impressed her first of all. Their names might be Ruth Brown or Jimmy Lakin or Mary Harrigan, but her name was Rhoda Fair. It meant something and set her apart. Unconsciously she began to think of other children as children, but of herself as a Rhoda Fair. It was a classification, and, sometimes a distinction. It earned her deference in hours of peace as it earned her gibes in time of war. . . . Here was a little boy who had but one eye—she was something like that. Not exactly like it, it is true. There was another little boy whose father was a policeman. It was more like that, but still different in some intangible way. She did not know the word glamour, but did have some glimmering of its significance—enough to know that glamour attached to her—when stigma did not. Apparently it depended upon whether you were on friendly terms or unfriendly. A little girl who sought her out and fawned upon her one day might, after a quarrel, call names at her and mention jails and say she was not fit for children of decent parents to play with.

  It is creditable to the neighborhood that summary spankings usually followed these latter cases, and chidings and explanations which did not explain. Women treated little Rhoda with deliberate and painstaking gentleness—as if they had to go out of their way to deal so with her when it was not at all necessary with other children. Little Rhoda noticed this and thought upon it.

  It was a strange and jumbled world she lived in, nor, as her years added to their total, did it become less unreasonably complex. Even when school contacts and an unusually acute understanding gave her a more nearly normal comprehension of crime and criminals and put her in possession of the world's point of view regarding professional lawbreakers, she could not quite bring herself to adopt any side of the argument excepting that to which she had been brought up. . . . It was not until she was a young lady that fear assailed her and a hatred of crime—and that was because of her name.

  Rhoda Fair! First to last it was the cause of not a few distressing contretemps. It was a known name. The first of these experiences was during her first week in the college to which her mother sent her. In the village store she made certain purchases which were to be sent to her rooms. It was necessary to give her name. The storekeeper laughed.

  "You young ladies," he said, genially, "are such jokers." Rhoda lifted her eyes to his face in perplexity.

  "If," he said, "I'd known Rhoda Fair was coming into my store I'd 'a' locked the safe and set the constable to guard it with a shotgun. . . . Now what name shall I write down?"

  "Rhoda Fair."

  "Honest?"

  "That is my name," she said.

  He squinted at her. "Kind of a funny name for a young lady to have," he said.

  It was then she looked him straightly in the eye. "The Rhoda Fair is my mother," she said.

  Curiously, even in these days when she bordered upon her twenties, she could not—indeed, did not strive to—abolish a wayward, impish pride in Rhoda Fair the elder and in her exploits and her old life. There came a time when this alarmed her. When she undertook the more intricate study of psychology she viewed it as a tendency; considered it apprehensively as a constantly reiterated subconscious urge which might lead to disaster. Upon this point she pondered greatly until it became a terror. . . . Having been abnormal from birth, her greatest desire was to be normal. A reaction set in. She could not abhor crime because it was crime—could not rise to moral indignation against it—but she did fear it as another person might sit in terror of St. Vitus' dance or of fits. The fact that she did not abhor crime as a moral evil frightened her. In short, there fastened upon her a clammy mental tentacle, a cold, dreadful threat, and this threat was that she might be foreordained by laws of heredity or of psychology to follow in the footsteps of her mother.

  She was not yet wise enough to thank God for another inheritance, which was nothing less than the same impish humor which had embellished her mother's exploits. It sustained her, prevented her descent into morbidity—and made for personal popularity with the girls among whom her life was lived for the four years devoted to higher education.

  Rhoda was popular, but, when one subjects it to analysis, it was a strange popularity, an abnormal popularity. In the beginning the young women about her strove to demonstrate their independence of thought and their broad-mindedness by accepting her. Their curiosity helped. The glamour attaching to her name did its bit. . . . It is true that she was really liked, really admired, as her college mates came to know her well, but always, in the background, was the fact that she was Rhoda Fair, daughter of Rhoda Fair, queen of confidence women! And she was aware of it.

  Now she had been at home, her college years completed, for twelve months, and she was nearing her twenty-first birthday. . . . Her mother was dead; she had but an hour before returned from bestowing Rhoda Fair in her ultimate finite place of abode, and she was frightened, bewildered, lost in the wilderness, deprived of a beloved guide when most that guide was needed. Until this moment she had not realized how she had loved, worshiped, admired, depended upon Rhoda Fair. Until this hour she had not perceived the greatness, the fine sturdiness of the woman who was her mother—had not perceived it in its actuality, and she stood aghast at her loss. . . . She was alone. There was no other hand, no other intelligence, to depend upon save her own. The world assumed vast, threatening proportions, the terrible infinity of space from which one shrinks in a nightmare.

  Yet she was adventurous. The daughter of such a mother, of such a father, could be no otherwise. It was the sudden shock of loss which unmanned her in that hour, and not fear of the great adventure of life, for she was ready to live, eager to live, as it was right and good that she should be. In her moment of panic it must be credited to her that from infancy she had been dominated; unconsciously, without intention, Rhoda Fair had dominated her daughter as such dynamic personalities must overshadow those among whom it moves and acts. So it was more than companionship and guidance that Rhoda missed now; it was the sudden realization of restraint removed, the sense of absolute liberty which beat upon her. Her will was conscious of itself for the first time; from now henceforward it must function. . . . By her own will and imagination she must make or mar her life. As yet there was no problem. It would have been better had there been, for then she could have focused upon it—there was only a vast, formless uncertainty.

  The doorbell rang and the maid of all work appeared to announce that Captain Spencer was calling—and that old man, not chancing the possibility of a refusal to see him, followed close upon the girl's heels. He stood in the door, tall, spare, with the shrinkage of his seventy-nine years, the unmistakable policeman from square toes to white hair. Rhoda had said once, with that good humor which was her inheritance, that, no matter what God tried to make of him in the hereafter, he could never be anything but a policeman angel. . . . But he was her good friend; for years had been steadfast friend to her
mother.

  "Rhody," said the old man without preamble, "it seemed like I had to have a talk with you."

  She walked to him and placed her hands upon his shoulders. "It was sweet of you to come," she said, simply.

  He sat down stiffly and stared about the room, scowling in his unease. "It ain't easy to realize she's gone," he said, presently. "Didn't seem like Rhody Fair could die. There's always folks you feel that way about—there was Roosevelt." He ruminated briefly. "But that hain't what I come to talk about—it's you."

  Rhoda waited. She knew that, whatever he came to say, his intentions were fine and protective. His words might be ill chosen and couched as no man with tact would couch them—but the thread of gold would be there.

  "She was a big woman," he said at last, "mebby the biggest you and me will ever know—and she could get away with it."

  "With what, Captain?"

  "Runnin' with the hare and huntin' with the hounds," he said, succinctly.

  Again Rhoda waited; perhaps because this very matter had, subconsciously, lain close to her heart—a troublesome, unnamed ache.

  "She was big. In them old days she was the biggest thing there was in wimmin crooks." The captain did not gloss matters over; it was not his abrupt way to do so. "When she started runnin' straight she kep' on bein' a big woman. Nobody else could 'a' done what she did—kep' friends with both sides. It took a lot, but Rhody Fair had a lot. . . . This house has been overrun with crooks for twenty year, but there's never been a pinch here or near here. Mebby she'd hid somebody out and mebby she's come through with getaway money—but she was big enough to do it and keep her hands clean, and what she said went with the fly bunch. They didn't use her. . . .

  But she's gone, Rhody."

  "She's gone," repeated the girl.

  "And you got to choose," said Captain Spencer.

  There it was—the thing put into words. She had to choose. Her will must function, a decision must be made.