It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.
“He went to Seattle that afternoon,” Spade said, “and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn’t look like the first, but they were niore alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”
“How perfectly fascinating,” Brigid O’Shaughnessy said. She left her chair and stood in front of him, close. Her eyes were wide and deep. “I don’t have to tell you how utterly at a disadvantage you’ll have me, with him here, if you choose.”
Spade smiled slightly without separating his lips. “No, you don’t have to tell me,” he agreed.
“And you know I’d never have placed myself in this position if I hadn’t trusted you completely.” Her thumb and forefinger twisted a black button on his blue coat.
Spade said, “That again!” with mock resignation.
“But you know it’s so,” she insisted.
“No, I don’t know it.” He patted the hand that was twisting the button. “My asking for reasons why I should trust you brought us here. Don’t let’s confuse things. You don’t have to trust me, anyhow, as long as you can persuade me to trust you.”
She studied his face. Her nostrils quivered.
Spade laughed. He patted her hand again and said: “Don’t worry about that now. He’ll be here in a moment. Get your business with him over, and then we’ll see how we’ll stand.”
“And you’ll let me go about it–with him–in my own way?”
“S mire.”
She turned her hand under his so that her fingers pressed his. She said softly: “You’re a God-send.”
Spade said: “Don’t overdo it.”
She looked reproachfully at him, though smiling, and returned to the padded rocker.
Joel Cairo was excited. His dark eyes seemed all irises and his highpitched thin-voiced words were tumbling out before Spade had the door half-open.
“That boy is out there watching the house, Mr. Spade, that boy you showed me, or to whom you showed me, in front of the theatre. What am I to understand from that, Mr. Spade? I came here in good faith, with no thought of tricks or traps.”
“You were asked in good faith.” Spade frowned thoughtfully. “But I ought to’ve guessed he might show up. He saw you come in?”
“Naturally. I could have gone on, but that seemed useless, since you had already let him see us together”
Brigid O’Shaughnessy came into the passageway behind Spade and asked anxiously: “What boy? What is it?”
Cairo removed his black hat from his head, bowed stiffly, and said in a prim voice: “If you do not know, ask Mr. Spade. I know nothing about it except through him.”
“A kid who’s been trying to tail me around town all evening,” Spade said carelessly over his shoulder, not turning to face the girl. “Come on in, Cairo, There’s no use standing here talking for all the neighbors.”