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

by Clarence Budingtion Kelland

  She was silent.

  "You and I together—why I've a scheme now! It seems funny, doesn't it, but a crook can fall in love just like a bank clerk. And I did, Rhoda. The first time ever I saw you, head over heels. . . . Oh, what a pair we'd make! . . . Surely, you don't want the other thing! You're not made for it. We'd just gallop through the world and laugh our heads off at the coppers. . . ." Suddenly his voice became grave and earnest. "I do love you, Rhoda. . . . How about it?"

  Her first proposal of marriage! Her first declaration of love! And this is how it came, in a darkened room, the lips of a jewel robber whispering in her ear, the eyes of pursuing policemen fastened upon the windows of the room! It was not as she had pictured it, not as she, in common with all girls approaching womanhood, had anticipated it. . . . But it had its glamour, too. What other woman had ever listened to declaration of love in circumstances like these? The adventurous, the reckless, the bizarre in her aroused to the seductiveness of it. . . . But she would not have been her mother's daughter had she not thought before she acted, or if she had allowed herself to be swept from her feet. . . . Nor did she love this man—yet. It was all too new, too unexpected.

  "We've other things on our mind just now," she said.

  "You'll keep the stones?"

  "Yes," she said, and so that die was cast, that question answered, that definite step outside the law taken. . . . The next step would not be so difficult, and this she realized dimly and not without apprehension.

  "Then," he said, "I'll be going. Nothing to worry about. Even if they get me, which they won't—there's not a thing to tie me to. . . . Give the stuff to a man who will ask for it in the next day or two. . . . And, my dear, I'll be back. Don't forget. I'll be back in the daylight, when I can see you, when I don't have to imagine your eyes. . . . Eyes are so hard to imagine; that's because of what's behind them. . . . I think we'll be very happy together; at any rate we'll live. Oh, but won't we live!" He pressed her hand; she felt the movement of his body as he raised himself to his feet, and then he was gone. She waited, keyed high, apprehensive, thrilled—afraid, but with such fear as brought a keen pleasure. . . . Ten minutes, twenty, a half hour she waited, and there was no sound. Then she knew he had gotten safely away. . . .

  Of a sudden she lifted her hands and felt within them the hazardous bulk of the stolen jewels. . . .

  Chapter Three

  WHEN Rhoda Fair awoke in the morning it was to the consciousness of a formed determination. It was as if some servant had appeared at her bedside and offered it to her, complete and ready to use, upon a tray, and she accepted it without argument. She was going away. It was not so much as if she were going away of her own volition as that she was being expelled—as if she were a seed between the thumb of righteousness and the forefinger of lawlessness to be shot through the air by their irresistible pressure. She was equally resentful of both; resentful of the will of each to force her to its ways and desires. Whatever she did she wished to do of her own free will, of independent choice—not to be hustled and jostled. Personalities did not enter in—except as representatives of classes. Jaunty Bailey was no individual to be considered as such—not this morning. That might come later. Now he was a sort of ambassador of the world to which he belonged. So it was with Captain Spencer.

  It was not a flight. She was not afraid—that word did not express her emotion. No. Her going was rather a pilgrimage, a quest; she was to become a Seeker, cutting herself off from the forces which sought to sway her and searching for freedom, for peace, for the undisturbed opportunity to take her life in her hands and to determine without prejudice or coercion how its growth should be directed.

  She herself believed it was a material search, a hunt for a material life which would bring her happiness—or if not happiness, contentment. In reality the thing was deeper than that. Objectively she had been disturbed by Bailey and by Captain Spencer, but inwardly, in the hidden centers of her being, she had been disturbed by the things they represented. Had she been reared with a veneration for religion the search might have taken the road of prayer, but she had been educated rather in a quaint philosophy of life than in any spiritual beliefs. So she did not pray. The thought did not occur to her. . . . Nevertheless, the disturbance which sent her upon her quest was spiritual; the instinctive demand of her soul for the right to find itself, to educate itself, to perceive and to choose. Vaguely she comprehended that her conceptions of right and wrong were inchoate. It was essential to separate and winnow them; to thresh upon the threshing floor, and by her own efforts to find what was golden grain and what was husk. . . . This she would discover when leisure came and material pressure lessened.

  Having determined, she acted. It was not difficult to make arrangements, for her mother had left her wealthy. There were no ties to bind her, and the man who for a generation had handled her mother's legal affairs made the way easy for her. Before nightfall her packing was completed, before another nightfall she would be on her way toward the eastern shore against which broke that ocean which would bear to her something stranger, something more astounding, something more marvelous than the lands and peoples and customs of the more ancient world.

  As she packed, those jewels which Jaunty Bailey entrusted to her keeping were not absent from her mind. They troubled her. . . . An emergency had forced them upon her, made her a participant in a crime. She had not been given time to think; sympathy and resentment had shouldered her into the false and dangerous position she occupied; it was not her free act and deed. Again resentment surged. How far she was bound and to what she was bound she could not determine. For hours she debated the question of mailing the stones to their owner, but her right to do so was not clear. There was also the apprehension that Jaunty Bailey's messenger would call to demand them—and then how would she act? The moral obligations were confused, not to be separated. . . . And here, again, the decision seemed to come to her full formed: She would do nothing about it, would hasten her going, would keep the jewels in her own hands safely, giving them neither to the thief nor to the owner, but holding them in a sort of spiritual escrow until she could puzzle out the tortuous question they involved. . . . She did not take into consideration that she thus became a keeper of stolen goods, liable as such to the pains and penalties of a law which would not inquire into her reasons. . . .

  So, hastily, she went away, and none, not even herself, knew her ultimate destination. Only her mother's lawyer knew she was going, and that she would take ship across the Atlantic—and he, no more than she, knew what vessel nor what would be her first port of call.

  Two weeks she spent in New York, awaiting the arrival of her passport and of sailing day, and then, for the first time in her life, she became a part of that little universe which your ocean liner is when land has dropped from view behind her, when nothing is visible to the eye ahead, astern, to port or to starboard, but sea and sky. It was new to her, and she responded to the adventure of it as if she were the first woman to attempt a crossing. The realization that she, alone, without companion or restraint, was voyaging into the unknown, was like wine singing in her head. She would even have welcomed a storm, the wild tossing of giant billows, the lash and roar of tempest—because storm was a rightful part of all this and she wanted to be denied nothing which was her right.

  She stood upon the promenade deck until the vessel pridefully made its way through the shipping of the river, past the Statue, and dropped the pilot with the open ocean just ahead; nor, as the shores of her country dropped behind, was she oppressed by loneliness. On the contrary, she experienced a feeling of sufficiency. Though there was no soul upon the vessel whom, to her knowledge, she had ever seen before, she did not feel the lack of human companionship; her anticipations were too keen for that. . . . Everything was interesting. Presently she descended to her cabin to settle for the voyage, but impatiently gave over the task of setting to rights such impedimenta as would be necessary during her residence upon the high seas—abandoned it to explore
with the eagerness of a ten-year-old boy.

  Rhoda was curiously sophisticated, but even more curiously unsophisticated. There was so much she knew which the most knowing of women never guess; so much of which she was ignorant which the most unsophisticated of women know as elementary! But her ignorance was offset by clear-eyed daring and by something which was not so much courage as unafraidness. She was one of those fortunate people who did things as a matter of course, and her manner of doing them was insurance against harm. . . . There was an eagerness, a hunger, to know. The life and customs of a vessel interested her to the minutest detail: stewards, dinner gongs, the service of meals, the officers and their duties—all the machinery of a new world. . . . She was excited, and in her excitement forgot that tiny parcel which, even in midocean, linked her with the criminal world which reached out, desiring to possess her. . . .

  It is the way of first dinners on shipboard to be a sort of ordeal; everybody is undergoing scrutiny; everybody is wondering who everybody else is and trying to match names on the passenger list to personages who attract the attention. It is a first, rather difficult breaking of the ice, except at those fortunate, gay tables occupied by parties of old acquaintances. On the Conte Rosso the company were to be together for twelve days and the company was speculating as to how it was going to get on with itself. . . . Rhoda found herself seated at a round table with six strangers, and, as she was last to take her place, she had to undergo the ordeal of silence and appraising eyes natural to such an occasion. But it was made easy for her by the grave, gracious courtesy of an elderly gentleman—or so at first glance she judged him—who sat opposite her place. He arose as she approached her chair and smiled.

  "Mademoiselle," he said, in a remarkably rich and musical voice, "we are fortunate. You are to be of our little company."

  "Thank you," she said, simply, and seated herself in the chair which the steward held for her. Nevertheless, unimportant as the moment was upon its face, a feeling rested upon her that it was, somehow, momentous. It was not a feeling of depression; quite the contrary. Strangely, as her eyes rested upon those of the gentleman who welcomed her, she became conscious of contentment, of peace, of safety. . . . It passed, yet it left its mark. Never, in her short life, had a meeting with any individual so affected her, and she marveled at it.

  "We have been exchanging names," said the gentleman, smiling about the circle, upon the other men who remained standing while Rhoda took her seat. "Mine is—" his voice paused for a significant instant, "Ghafir."

  "And mine," Rhoda answered, "is Fair."

  "And these other companions," he said, "are Mr. and Mrs. Knapp, from your city of Boston; at your right, Mrs. Lord and her daughter, Mrs. Roberts, from your great metropolis of New York; and lastly, Professor Dare. . ."

  The young man named last lifted his chin in an odd gesture. "Not professor," he said, coldly, "only mister."

  "We cannot change what we are by giving it a name," said Mr. Ghafir, gently.

  Rhoda scrutinized the young man who had declined the title and found him interesting, if somewhat repellent. He was young, under thirty, she guessed, with dark, lean, singularly handsome face and black, hungry, protesting eyes. He was tall, slender, yet not without a suggestion of graceful physical strength—a notable, indeed, distinguished figure, and one to demand admiration. To her eye he seemed the embodiment of intelligence, cold possibly without charm, enigmatic. His face made one think of arguments upon points too remote for the ordinary human understanding, of cold reason. . . . It was not difficult to perceive how Mr. Ghafir had fallen into the error of entitling him professor. . . . As to the others, they were commonplace. Mr. Knapp, whose conversation proved him to be of the legal profession, was a smug, jowled man whose cheeks seemed to strive to crowd in upon his soft nose, and who carried little books in his pocket and paraded his erudition. His wife was a motherly, ingratiating soul, evidently suppressed, but pitifully friendly. Mrs. Lord was a handsome, jeweled old lady, charming, companionable—family and gentle traditions spoke from her face and her manner eloquently. Her daughter bore slight resemblance to her with her discontented, handsome, much labored-over face. Modern she was and quite at ease with her status as divorcee, but none the less striving to be pleasant, and succeeding with the skill of a not overly intelligent woman of the world. . . . It was an acceptable company with which to cross the sea, promising much of variety and of interest.

  Mr. Knapp ordered Lachima Christi and addressed himself to his ministrone, which he disposed of with gusto, and became heavily jocular. Looking up from the passenger list upon which, it was evident, he had been checking off his companions, he addressed Rhoda in his lightest and most playful manner.

  "Ah," he explained, "a coincidence! How small the world is and how things repeat themselves. Your name has been filling our papers—a famous name. But I see public report has again proven itself to be false, for they reported your death."

  Rhoda was unconscious of the eyes of Mr. Ghafir, fixed upon her with gentle, inquiring interest—one might have said with sympathy and understanding, for she had eyes for none but Mr. Knapp and ears for nothing but what he was about to say. . . . In her excitement she had forgotten—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say laid aside recollection for the moment. . . . Now she recalled that her name was Rhoda Fair and that she was marked by it, indicated, set aside from her fellow-men. . . . It is creditable to her, to the straightforwardness and loyalty of her, that never had the idea of altering her name occurred to her, and that, had it occurred to her, she would have ejected it firmly. In her heart she was proud of her name and of her mother. . . .

  "But we see you in the flesh," went on the facetious Mr. Knapp, "somewhat younger than I would have guessed. But nowadays women disguise their ages." He chuckled and preened himself before his wife, who was eying him apprehensively, for she was well acquainted with the maladroitness of his humor. "Even so," he went on, "it does not seem possible you could have looted a bank in eighteen ninety-two."

  The attention of the table was focused now upon Rhoda, who, as Mr. Knapp paused to wrack his brain for further humor, looked gravely, steadily from eye to eye.

  "You are speaking of Rhoda Fair," she said, nor did her voice tremble as she spoke. "There is no coincidence and it is natural that my name should be what it is . . . She was my mother."

  Mr. Knapp's pouting mouth remained open and his puttylike cheeks flushed slowly at realization of his gaucherie. He swallowed and wallowed in his embarrassment while his wife's eyes snapped her indignation as she said to him in a whisper, "There—again." Then to Rhoda with motherly sympathy: "You mustn't mind him, dear. He's always that way—and you, poor child, have just lost your mother."

  Mr. Ghafir leaned forward and spoke in his low, musical voice. "Miss Fair has lost more than a mother," he said; "she has lost also the companionship and guidance of one of the greatest women I have ever known."

  "You knew her?" Rhoda exclaimed.

  "I have known many, many people," he said, with a strange, patient smile.

  She felt the eyes of young Mr. Dare fixed upon her in a cold, interested scrutiny, and felt, for the moment, as if she were some specimen upon a slide beneath a microscope, to be studied, classified, perhaps lectured upon to some adolescent classroom. She was, to him, an interesting exhibit, a biological curiosity, a thing to scrutinize in a quest for data upon the disputed subject of heredity. Rhoda resented him; it was not an auspicious commencement of their acquaintanceship.

  Mrs. Roberts began to chatter in the normal effort of a woman of the world to cover from view a faux pas; the others, ill at ease, seconded her intention, but the remainder of the meal passed under a tension which was not lightened by the patent efforts of the women to exhibit an effusive kindliness toward Rhoda. They arose together and Mr. Ghafir stepped to Rhoda's side.

  "Miss Fair," he said, "I think we may hope for a moon. I am sure you will find the deck pleasant, if somewhat chilly. It would give me great pleasure if
you would walk with me. I am a great tramper on shipboard."

  "Thank you," said Rhoda, and then with intention, so the others could not fail to overhear and to understand, "And you can tell me how and when you met my mother."

  "There will be music presently," said Mrs. Roberts, "and, I believe, dancing after ten."

  Rhoda acknowledged this with a bow and accompanied Mr. Ghafir from the dining-salon. They made a complete round of the promenade deck in silence; the night was such as one may find only upon the Atlantic in winter, chilly but peaceful with the rare, cold light of the moon tipping the little waves with silver, and the silence of illimitable space around and above.

  "In the presence of space—and of time—the soul shrinks to nothingness," said Mr. Ghafir, gravely, "or, if it be one of those rare, brave souls, it swells, grows, reaches out until it fills the universe."

  "I am not afraid," said Rhoda. It was easy to talk to this man, to utter before him the things which one keeps hidden in the heart. She felt she was answering a question.

  "You were brave this evening," he said. "I admired you."

  "Because I did not deny my mother!"

  "A greater than you and I denied Him," said Mr. Ghafir, "denied Him thrice . . . . It would have been human nature."

  She lifted her eyes to his questioningly. "Are you a preacher?" she asked, but he shook his head with a grave smile. It reassured her. She did not like preachers. They had a way of asking impertinent questions as if it were the right of their cloth; of obtruding a thing called religion, either with smugness or with spurious good-fellowship, or of speaking of their God and His worship with forced and artificial slang as if it were necessary to demonstrate by colloquialisms that they were exactly as other men. She suspected preachers.

  "Then what are you?" she demanded.

  He smiled and for days she carried with her the memory of that smile, for in it was wisdom, tolerance, understanding—and something else, something above and beyond her comprehension. "I am only a Watchman," he said, and something prevented her asking an explanation.