“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN"

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 March 1940, Page 10

“RENTS ARE LOW IN EDEN"

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

By

PETER BENEDICT.

CHAPTER XV. Lyddon brought Catherine the evening papers, and she saw with amazement that the case had caught the public imagination, so that her smart reply to Wyndham had sprung into the headlines, and her name must by then have become almost a household word. She turned the pages listlessly. “You must have had enough court atmosphere for one day,” said Lyddon “lets go to a theatre, shall we?” “Yes, let’s!” agreed Catherine, almost eagerly. And to a theatre they went. But strangely there was no comfort there, either for Catherine or Lyddon. All the elation of the day, all its excitement, and its spice of combat, were gone. Catherine felt nothing but foreboding, now, and a sudden distaste for the weapons she had chosen. She dreaded the next day, though why she did not know. Even the wrongs of Court Brandon seemed very distant and long ago. The only things she clearly remembered were the patterns of liquid mud among the broken brick paving of Howard’s Pleasance. After lunch next day, to everyone's surprise, Perry turned up. He walked into the restaurant where they were having coffee, to be met by a barrage of pleased, but startled questions. "I just couldn't keep away,” he admitted. smiling. "I know you don't need me, but I had to come. Tell me what’s been going on." ‘'•Well,” said his mother, who had joined them for the meal, “everything seems to be going quite well, and all they got out of Catherine was that the prosecution was malicious which of course everyone knew before. And so far they haven’t shaken the actual papers in the case at all. But yesterday “Oh, yesterday!" said Perry scornfully, and waved a newspaper at them. “I know yesterday’s hearing off by heart. You’ve seen this, I suppose. You must have done. Everyone in Court Brandon was reading it when 1 left this morning. They’re talking about nothing else." He smiled at Catherine radiantly across the table, as if he expected her to be grateful for the intelligence. The smile he received in return was by no means spontaneous; it occurred to her that Perry was enjoying the notoriety she had drawn upon them all. He considered it rather as fun, and that in spite of the sincere feeling he had for the serious issue. She said: “No, I don’t suppose they are,” and set her teeth. “But what has happened this morning? Do tell me; you must know how I want every word.” He got every word, from one or another of them but curiously few from Catherine. How smoothly the morning had gone, and how impressive had been the disinterested recital of Mr Hart, who so obviously cared nothing for the issue of the case that Wyndham had sat tight and let him alone, and continued to seem to sleep, as was his habit when most alert. The. prosecution would close its case that day, in all probability. It seemed strange to Perry that Catherine should sit staring into her coffee-cup in the detached manner of a seer, when so much excitement was in the air. As they walked back towards the law courts afterwards, he drew her away from die others. She knew at once, what she had not before realised, that she was behaving in a calculated way to rouse all Perrys celluloid devotion for her; and she tried, too late, to redeem the position. After all. she owed him something in return, if only a little melodrama; moreover, the chivalry of Perry was apt to be of an exuberant kind which she could well do without, just now. “I’m perfectly all right, of course,” she said in reply to the inevitable question. “It’s just the strain, I suppose.”

“Well, why don’t you skip this afternoon? It won’t make any difference, will it?' Let’s go and do a cinema instead, shall we?” “But wouldn't you rather be in court?” fenced Catherine: for though the idea appeared to her a good one, she was in a mood when she wanted no one’s company, least of all that of an excitable boy who knew too much about her problems to be interested on any other subject just then. “I don’t mind; though, of course—” Catherine looked up at him as they walked, and asked what she had been longing to ask from the moment he had mentioned Court Brandon. “Perry, what are they saying about me at home?" “Well,” said Perry, and was silent for a long lime. "You needn't be afraid to tell me; 1 never expected to be popular with the bigwigs over this business; but then I never was popular with them, was I?" She smiled, rather wanly. "Well, what do our esteemed councillors have to, say about me now?" /‘lt isn’t what they say, so much,” said Perry hesitantly, frowning at the ground. "Not they? Then who? She looked up at his face, and knew the answer, or, believed that she knew it. "Everyone, I suppose?” “Well, the new people, mostly; the tenants in Probert’s houses. They’re dead against you; they're very bitter about it. They seem to look upon him as a sort of saint." He stole a glance at her. and added hastily; "Yes, they do really 1 know it’s funny " “Is it?” said Catherine. “Well, it must be; I mean, the man serves his own ends surely, like the 1 rest of his kind. But they take the

line that you're standing in the way of —well, of the betterment of the poor, I suppose they'd say. Hang it, he builds them for money, doesn't he?'’ “I suppose so," said Catherine numbly. "I’ve always taken it for granted; perhaps I’ve taken too much for granted.” "Well, what else could it be? Wouldn’t he have gone to the trouble to explain himself, if he’d been doing it all out of pure altruism?" To herself Catherine said, clearly and unmistakably: "No, he wouldn't!” But aloud she said only, pausing before the shop window by which they happened to be passing at the moment: "Look. isn't that a stunning little hat —the blue one in the middle —" Perry was not interested in fashions in hats, or for the matter of that in anything at all but Catherine's unreasonable depression at that moment. He said, with a desperate cheerfulness: "Oh, well, come on into court and see his standard go down, and then you’ll feel better.” » But Catherine did not feel better. Neither the abortive excitement of the court, or examination and cross .examination, of hearing points brought out in her favour, and other points twisted against her; not the long duel between Wyndham and Beresford over whether a certain question should or should not be asked; not Perry’s exuberance beside her; nor any exhilaration there might have been in the theory of the tight at least—none of these things gave her the satisfaction she had looked for from them. The prosecution closed its case decorously in time for the court to rise for the day. The outlook for the verdict was fairly bright, but as yet it was, of course, anybody’s fight. Catherine was expeced to feel some reaction but not this frozen calm of indifference which had so inexplicably settled upon her. Their concern troubled her so much that in the evening she gave them all the slip, and went for a walk along the embankment by herself. She was coming back through the first twilight of a fine evening, for November wonderfully mild and clear, when she saw pass by her, in one of the busiest corners of a busy street, a face that she knew. The meeting was so unexpected, in that place and at that time, that at first she doubted her own eyes, and hung for a moment poised on one foot, with her chin on her shoulder, staring after her. A small woman, with a quick, alert walk, and wearing rusty black several years out of fashion; a woman of perhaps forty to forty-five years of age. and used to an independent poverty all her life. Catherine knew the walk, and the fragility of the stooped shoulders, even better than she had known the face in the fraction of a moment when her eyes had rested upon it. On a wild impulse she turned, and hurried after her, slipping through the crowds carelessly. The little woman walked fast, but Catherine was the taller, and had the longer step; and in a few minutes she caught her quarry by the arm. “Mrs Garland! How nice to see someone I know —” Mrs Garland turned with a start, and recognised her, not with a smile she had expected, but with a long, hard stare. "You remember me, Mrs Garland? Catherine Court!” “Yes,” said Mrs Garland slowly, and in a tone Catherine hardly recognised for the tone she had heard in Howard's Pleasance, so philisophical, and capable, and alive with fun. She shook the clinging hand from her arm as if it had been so much fallen dust. “Yes, I remember you. I'm not likely to ! forget you in a hurry, am I. You that talked so prettily about the poor people. and were so horrified to think of the houses they had to live in. I wonder you dare speak to me! If I were you, I wouldn’t show my face in Court Brandon again, after this.” For a moment they stood staring at each other . Catherine’s face grew whiter than her strange sickness of the mind had already made it; but it seemed that she had nothing, not one word, to say in reply; so that Mrs Garland, who, like a fair-minded critic, had waited simply enough for her answer, now shrugged, and turned on her heel to walk on. But Catherine started out of her stupefaction. She put out her hand, and touched the black-clad arm appealingly. “Wait a moment! You can't just go away like that. What have you heard about me? What have they been telling you?" "Nobody’s told me anything more than everyone knows who reads the papers. This case of yours. You must have had it all planned in your mind before you came to Howard's Pleasance that day; I suppose you were laughing about, it to yourself while you were talking all that stuff about the Pleasance being horrible. You to dare speak to me, after that! And you busy trying to get money out of the one man who’s done something for us.” Catherine did not trouble to say now, she would never stoop to explain to anyone again, how little she cared for the money. That, after all, was her own affair. But she did say, with some anger flaring slowly in her voice: "You consider yourself competent to judge between him and me, then, do you? You know everything there is to be known about the case, do you? What right have you. any more than I. to set yourself up as a judge? What I said in the Pleasance 1 meant, every word —though I seem to remember ] that I said very little ” (To be Continued.)