payment.”
What nonsense over a mere ten dollars. I have ever been good with words, good with the gentle art of persuasion, but I rarely could summon the will to speak to this creature with a smooth tongue. Instead, I took a step forward and gave her my most charming smile. “Mrs. Deisher, we have ever been friends, have we not?” Never wait for an answer to such a question. “We have ever been on excellent terms. I have always been your admirer. You know that, do you not, Mrs. Deisher?”
“Have you the money?” she asked.
“A mere ten dollars? Of course I have the money. I shall have it for you tomorrow. Next week at the latest.”
“But not only for this month, sir. You owe for the past months. You must pay thirty dollars to clear the account.”
My mind had only been half engaged in this conversation, for it was a dance we had danced before, and we knew each other’s moves as well as old lovers. Instead, I had been turning over thoughts of Mrs. Pearson and, to a lesser extent, Lavien, while I absently charmed my way into my unpaid rooms. The demand for thirty dollars arrested my attention, however.
“Thirty dollars!” I said. “Mrs. Deisher, is this the time to speak of such things, in the cold darkness when, as you can see from my face, I have suffered great injury tonight?”
She shifted her squat weight and squared her squat shoulders. “I must have money now. There is a young man with wife, a baby, who can take your room in the morning. You will pay me, or you will go. If you don’t do either, I will summon the watch.”
“Are you trying to ruin me?” I demanded. My irritation caused me to forget, if only for a moment, the value of good manners. “Can this not wait until morning? Can you not look at me and see I have had the very devil of a damnable night?”
Her face settled into hard woflishness. “Do not use such language. I don’t love it. Tell me only, have you money now?” She asked the question through trembling lips.
“It is clear that there is more to this than meets the eye. What is this about? Has someone paid you to cast me out? It was Dorland, wasn’t it?”
“Have you the money now?” she repeated, but with less self-righteousness.
I had hit upon something and thought to test my theory, so I said, “Yes, I do. I shall pay you, and then I shall go to sleep.”
“Too late!” she shrieked. “It is too late! You have used me ill, and I do not want you no more. You must pay me and go.”
This was Dorland; it had to be. And yet I did not quite believe it. It was not that he was above such mean tricks, just that I did not think he had the wit to conceive of them. “If you are going to cast me out, you can hardly expect me to pay you,” I observed. “You’ll not get a penny.”
“Then you get out. You do it or I’ll call the watch.”
By itself, the watch was nothing to me, but I feared public knowledge of my eviction. Should word spread that I had lost my rooms, my creditors would descend upon me like starved lions on a wounded lamb. I could not disappear into the airless bog of debtor’s prison just when Cynthia Pearson had reappeared in my life.
It was not the first time I’d been cast out of a lodging, nor the first in the middle of the night. I had done what I could and would not humiliate myself by prolonging the argument. “Very well. I shall collect some things, and I shall quit your miserable house. Be so kind as to pack what I do not take now, and keep your fingers off what does not belong to you.”
“I keep your things as surety, and if you try to get them I’ll call the watch. The watch.” She’d seen it in my eyes, sensed my fear with her low animal cunning, and now she held forth the word like a talisman. “I call the watch and they take you away. Forever!”
Forever seemed a bit extreme, even for a flight of fancy, but I did not dash her dreams. I was too angry, and she must have seen that too in my eyes, for she took a frightened step
Eve Paludan, Stuart Sharp