You’ll just have to go with me at first, that’s all, and explain, or I never can go — I don’t care what happens.”
Her eyes were round and excited and her face, while registering all the depression and fear that had recently been there, was transfigured by definite opposition.
But Clyde was not to be shaken either.
“You know how it is with me here, Bert.
I can’t go, and that’s all there is to it.
Why, supposing I were seen — supposing some one should recognize me?
What then?
You know how much I’ve been going around here since I’ve been here. Why, it’s crazy to think that I could go.
Besides, it will be a lot easier for you than for me.
No doctor’s going to think anything much of your coming to him, especially if you’re alone.
He’ll just think you’re some one who’s got in trouble and with no one to help you.
But if I go, and it should be any one who knows anything about the Griffiths, there’d be the deuce to pay.
Right off he’d think I was stuffed with money.
Besides, if I didn’t do just what he wanted me to do afterwards, he could go to my uncle, or my cousin, and then, good night!
That would be the end of me.
And if I lost my place here now, and with no money and that kind of scandal connected with me, where do you suppose I would be after that, or you either?
I certainly couldn’t look after you then.
And then what would you do?
I should think you’d wake up and see what a tough proposition this is.
My name can’t be pulled into this without trouble for both of us.
It’s got to be kept out, that’s all, and the only way for me to keep it out is for me to stay away from any doctor.
Besides, he’d feel a lot sorrier for you than he would for me.
You can’t tell me!”
His eyes were distressed and determined, and, as Roberta could gather from his manner, a certain hardness, or at least defiance, the result of fright, showed in every gesture.
He was determined to protect his own name, come what might — a fact which, because of her own acquiescence up to this time, still carried great weight with her.
“Oh, dear! dear!” she exclaimed, nervously and sadly now, the growing and drastic terror of the situation dawning upon her,
“I don’t see how we are to do then. I really don’t.
For I can’t do that and that’s all there is to it.
It’s all so hard — so terrible.
I’d feel too much ashamed and frightened to ever go alone.”
But even as she said this she began to feel that she might, and even would, go alone, if must be.
For what else was there to do?
And how was she to compel him, in the face of his own fears and dangers, to jeopardize his position here?
He began once more, in self-defense more than from any other motive:
“Besides, unless this thing isn’t going to cost very much, I don’t see how I’m going to get by with it anyhow, Bert.
I really don’t.
I don’t make so very much, you know — only twenty-five dollars up to now.” (Necessity was at last compelling him to speak frankly with Roberta.)
“And I haven’t saved anything — not a cent.
And you know why as well as I do.
We spent the most of it together.
Besides if I go and he thought I had money, he might want to charge me more than I could possibly dig up.
But if you go and just tell him how things are — and that you haven’t got anything — if you’d only say I’d run away or something, see —”
He paused because, as he said it, he saw a flicker of shame, contempt, despair at being connected with anything so cheap and shabby, pass over Roberta’s face.
And yet in spite of this sly and yet muddy tergiversation on his part — so great is the compelling and enlightening power of necessity — she could still see that there was some point to his argument.
He might be trying to use her as a foil, a mask, behind which he, and she too for that matter, was attempting to hide.
But just the same, shameful as it was, here were the stark, bald headlands of fact, and at their base the thrashing, destroying waves of necessity.
She heard him say: “You wouldn’t have to give your right name, you know, or where you came from.
I don’t intend to pick out any doctor right around here, see.
Then, if you’d tell him you didn’t have much money — just your weekly salary —”
She sat down weakly to think, the while this persuasive trickery proceeded from him — the import of most of his argument going straight home.