"I should say so! Poor and miserable."
"Oh, you laugh," Bettina protested. "But I saw a heart-broken letter about the poverty that kept them apart and condemned him 'to run in single harness.'"
"'Single harness!'" the husky voice said. And he repeated it: "'Single harness,' eh?"
Bettina was recovering her spirits. She said something about Duncombe. And I don't know what reminded her of the collie-dog story; but she told it very well, though she did "pile it on." She made me out an immense heroine, and I am afraid I looked sheepish.
The husky voice said "Good!" and "Pretty cool." The story seemed to remind him of something. He looked at his plate, and he looked at Bettina and me.
Betty was amused at having made me feel shy, and she laughed that bubbling laugh of hers.
The Tartar turned his head.
He did not take away his elbow. But he looked over his shoulder down on Bettina's apricot-coloured hair. The fillet showed the shape of her head. It defined the satiny crown, where the hair lay as close as a red-gold skull-cap. The forget-me-nots and the little green leaves held all smooth and tight except the heavy, shining rings. They fell out and lay on her neck.
The Tartar stopped talking about the race.
He still ate his food condescendingly—with one hand. But he drank with great good-will.
He called to the butler, who had been going round with a gold-necked bottle in a napkin. He was to come back, The Tartar said, and fill the ladies' glasses.
I said no. Bettina said she, too, drank water.
The Tartar said "Nonsense!"—quite as though the matter were for him to decide. The servant filled Bettina's tall, vaselike glass. Bettina looked alarmed. Already she had displeased this dreadful Tartar once.
"Ought I?" she telegraphed across to me. I shook my head.
"There is one woman in London"—The Tartar made a motion towards the head of the table—"one woman who's got a decent cellar." The Tartar was almost genial. He raised his glass to my aunt. "I approve of the new coiffure, too. Rippin'!"
The Colonel was not to be diverted from the subject of the wine. "Take an old man's advice," he said to me. "It's a chancy sort of world. Make sure of a little certain bliss." He lifted his own glass and drained it.
The Tartar said something to Bettina which I could not hear. She looked up at him with a kind of wonder in her eyes, and with that "fiery rose" quite suddenly overspreading her face again. She put out her hand to the tall glass, hesitated, and then looked at the head of the table. Perhaps Bettina saw what all of a sudden was clear to me. Aunt Josephine was like a huge grey hawk. The head craning out; the narrow forehead, all grey crest; the face falling away from the beak. How she had changed from the days when she had a double chin! The tilt of the outstretched head was exactly like a bird's. Watching sideways—watching ... for what?
The eye made me shrink. It made Bettina set her lips, obedient, to the glass. She looked apologetic over the rim at me.
Mine stood untouched.
"I see you have a will of your own," the voice on my right said in my ear.
The London way seemed to be that ladies did not leave the table while men smoked. The talk was about wines, but it flagged. The Tartar kept looking at Bettina. The fitful colour in her cheeks had paled again. The scent of flowers, and thatother all-pervading perfume, mixed with the tobacco, was making Bettina faint.
My man noticed it. "You aren't accustomed to smoke," he said to Bettina, and he twisted his cigar round on his fruit-plate till he crushed out the burning. But the others took no notice.
I was sure Bettina was trying hard to throw off her oppression. I thought of our mother; and the thought of her sent sharp aching through me. Bettina and I looked at each other. I knew by her lip she had great trouble not to cry.
"Do you think," I whispered to my man, "you could ask to have a window opened?"
He said we would be going into the drawing-room soon. "Drink that black coffee," he recommended.
He seemed not unkind, so I tried to think why he would not do so small a thing for us as ask to have a window opened. "Are the downstairs windows barred with iron, too?"
He looked sharply at me.
"I believe so," he said.
I thought it must be because of all the silver and valuables in the house. But he glanced at me again, as if he thought I was still wondering andmight ask someone else. Then he said he had heard "it used to be a private madhouse."
"This house?"
He nodded.
"You needn't say I told you."
That, then, was what I had been feeling. The poor mad people who used to be shut up here—they had left this uncanny influence behind. A strangeness and a strain.
The Colonel was speaking irritably to one of the footmen. Something had gone wrong with an electric-light bulb over the sideboard.
"Send for Waterson to-morrow to attend to that!"
No one but me seemed at all surprised to hear the Colonel giving orders in my aunt's house.
As I sat there in the midst of all the contending scents, with the soft clash of silver, glass, and voices in my ears, a train of ideas raced through my brain as crazy as any that could have been harboured here in the days when....
The letters that had come out of this house Eric had called "demented."
All the windows were still barred.
What if it were a private madhouse still! Before my eyes the watchful big footmen turned into keepers to the Grey Hawk and to the lady upstairs. The doctor—he was for those too dangerous to trust downstairs. That was why they had laughed at my inquiry—such callousness had familiarity bred. The Colonel might be the proprietor of the house. My aunt was well off. No doubt they humoured her. With a keeper dressed like a footman, they allowed her certain liberties—to write crazy letters in her harmless intervals ... friends to dine ... nieces to divert her. They would do almost anything to keep that red look out of her eyes.
"There is one thing I don't understand," I began to say to the man at my side.
But he was nervous too, and jumped down my throat: "Don't ask me questions! I never passed an examination in my life," he pulled out his watch. "And I've got an engagement to keep in exactly three minutes' time."
No wonder I stared. One man comes when dinner is half done, and one wants to go before the hostess had risen. For my part I wanted himnotto go ... I told him so.
"Why?" he turned suddenly and faced me.
I said it was perhaps because I felt I knew him best. "Anyway," I persisted, "don't go!" He hesitated. "Pleasedon't go," I said. I was relieved when he said, very well, he would "see it out." For I knew, had he gone, my aunt would think I had driven him away.
There was a rustle, and I saw Aunt Josephine rising. My man left me instantly. He went and opened the door. As we filed out he turned towards my aunt. I heard him whisper, "Je vous fais mes compliments, madame." He looked at Betty.
Aunt Josephine nodded. "But...." her face changed.
What was wrong? For whom was that "but"? I turned quickly and caught the yellow eyes leaving my back. I was "but." But why? What had I done? The Colonel talked to Betty and The Tartar, as he led the way back to the drawing-room. The other man still was behind with my aunt. He seemed to be reassuring her. His curious low voice kept going off the register. At a break I heard the words: "Doucement" enunciated with an emphasis that carried.
I kept thinking how all the softly-draped windows had iron bars behind the silk.
In the drawing-room, my aunt was saying to The Tartar, "Oh, yes, Bettina sings and dances."
"She sings," I said.
"Don't you skirt-dance?" The Tartar asked.
Bettina looked sorry. "I can dance ordinary dances," she said. "But what sort is a skirt-dance?"
The men made a semicircle round her to explain.
Betty said she hadn't done any skirt-dances since she was a little girl.
"Oh, and what are you now?" the Colonel said, grinning horribly.
They made Bettina tell about the action-songs our mother had taught us in the nursery. They asked her to do one.
Of course Bettina refused. "They're only for children," she said with that little air borrowed from our mother.
The Tartar threw back his bullet head and roared. The Colonel said they were sick, in London, of sophisticated dancing. What they wanted was Bettina's sort. Bettina shook her head.
The Grey Hawk said it was too soon after dinner. But they went across the room towards the piano.
I was following, when the man who had taken me in to dinner said: "This is a comfortable chair." So I sat down.
He said something about the strangeness of London "just at first." It would pass away.
I told him I hoped Bettina would find it so. As for me, I was only staying till to-morrow.
He looked so surprised that I explained I had to go back and take care of my mother.
"You have never been to London since you were a child—and you come all this way just for a few hours?"
"I came to take care of Betty," I said. "She has never travelled alone."
He looked at me: "And you?"
"Oh, I haven't either. To-morrow will be the first time. But then, I am older."
He said nothing for several moments. I looked across the room to where I could see the back of Bettina's head, between the bare crown of the Colonel and The Tartar's black bullet. The Tartar was bending over towards Bettina. AuntJosephine sat near them, facing the door, and us.
My man looked up suddenly and saw the eyes of the Grey Hawk on us.
"We must talk!" he said, with a laugh, "or they will think we aren't getting on. That isn't a comfortable chair after all." He stood up. I said it was quite comfortable. While he was insisting, a servant came in to speak to my aunt. I caught a glimpse through the door of a footman going upstairs with a short, fattish young man. Too young, I thought, to be another doctor.
We went to the end of the room, and we sat on a sofa near the fireplace—one of those sofas you sink down in till you feel half buried. I didn't like to say I hated it, for he was taking so much trouble. He put a great down cushion at my back, as if I were an invalid.
"There! Now, can you sit quite still for a few minutes? As still as if I were taking your picture?" I said I supposed I could. "And must I look pleasant?" I laughed. He hesitated and then: "How good are your nerves?" he asked.
"Very good," I boasted.
But he was grave.
"Have you ever fainted?"
"Never!" I said, a little indignantly.
"Could you hear something very unexpected, even horrible, and not cry out?"
"You know something!" I thought of an accident to my mother. "You have news for me...."
"Careful," he said in a sharp whisper. "You told me you could keep perfectly still. If you can't I won't go on." I begged him to go on, and I kept my face a blank. He turned his head slightly and took in the group at the other end of the room. He sat so a moment, with his eyes still turned away, while he said: "Everything—more than life, depends on your self-control during the next few minutes."
I sat staring at him.
"Have you any idea where you are?"—and still he looked not at me but towards the others.
My first bewilderment was giving way to fear. No fear now of anything he could tell me. Fear of the man himself. I saw it all. Not that iron-grey woman who had left the room with the servant, not the brilliant lady upstairs, but the person who had set me thinking wild thoughts at dinner about barred windows and private lunatic asylums.
The man sitting not three feet way from me—was mad.
I calculated the distance between me and the other group, while I answered him: "I am at my aunt's—Mrs. Harborough's."
"Where does your aunt live?"
"At 160 Lowndes Square."
"You are twenty minutes from Lowndes Square. You are in one of the most infamous houses in Europe."
Minutes seemed to go by. Vague hints from servants, things I had read in the papers—and still I sat there, not moving by so much as a hair.
He was looking at me now and telling me to "keep cool." And then: "I suppose you know therearesuch places——" He interrupted himself to say: "Remember! A careless look or move would mean—well, it would mean ruin.Nowdo you understand?"
Beyond a doubt I did. If I moved or cried for help, he would kill me before my aunt could get back; before I could cross the room. Though why he should wish to kill me I could form no idea.
"You must have time to recover," he said, in that muted, uneven voice. "I will shield you while you pull yourself together." He had bent forward till his shoulders shut out my view of the group at the other end of the room.
I shrank further back into the cushions. But:"I have myself in hand, now," I said; for I remembered you must never let the insane know you are afraid.
Betty's laughter sounded far away.
"Take your time," he said. "They're enjoying themselves. They haven't even rung for the cognac and liqueurs yet." They would make Bettina and me drink a liqueur, he said. Or if they failed in that, they'd say, "'a thimble-full of coffee, then.'" And our coffee would be "doctored."
"But we've had coffee," I said, in a new access of terror. Was it drugged coffee that made me feel so lamed?
"That was all right," he said. "That was to steadyus."
He did not look as if he needed steadying. What if he were not mad?
"Be careful," he said again. "Remember I am running a ghastly risk in telling you. But you are facing a ghastly certainty if I don't."
I sat in that stillness of stark terror—staring at him.
And as I stared I found myself clinging to the thought that had been horror's height a littlewhile before. "Pray God he's mad," I kept saying inwardly.
If I could keep my head, he said, I had no cause to be so frightened. It would be some little time before he could give me up without rousing suspicion.
"Before you give me up!" I imagined the Grey Hawk swooping to snatch me.
"Before I help you to get out of this," he explained. "And when I do, you will perhaps remember it is at a sacrifice. Greater than I supposed I could feel."
I moved at that—but like a sleep-walker on the edge of waking.
I asked him in a whisper what we were to do. I meant Betty and me. But he said: "When she begins to play, or to sing, you are to get up quite quietly—canyou?"
I made a sign for yes.
"No haste ... you must do it languidly—go out of the room."
"But my——" (I suppressed "my aunt" with an inward twist of questioning anguish) "——shall I not be asked where I am going and why?"
He said no. Because he would make the othersa sign. He thought my sister was too excited to take any notice of my going. "But if she does, I'll tell her you wanted her to go on singing. I shall seem to be coming after you. But I'll stop to explain that we've had an argument about one of the pictures in the hall." He told me what I was to do.
"If, after all, they were to prevent me—what, what then?"
"They won't—they will leave you to me." He said it with a look that stopped the heart.
I implored him to let me go out alone.
He fixed his unhappy eyes on mine. "You would never be allowed out of this room alone."
"I could say I must post a letter."
"They would ring for a servant."
I measured the long room. "If once I got as far as the door I could run."
"——as far as the front door perhaps. You would find it locked. No servant would open it for you."
"Will they for you?"
"I can do it for you," he said, under his breath, and he stood up.
I thought he meant I was to make trial thenof that terrible passage to the door. But was it not better to be where Betty was, whatever came—Betty and I together—than Betty alone with those devouring-eyed men, and I with a maniac out in the hall!
"I cannot leave my sister!" I said.
He stood in front of me, masking me from the others. "Haven't I made you understand? If you don't leave the room with me,shewill leave it with Whitby-Dawson."
"No! No!"
He hushed me. "She won't know why—but she'll do it. And she won't come back again. She would probably be on her way to Paris this time to-morrow." He pulled a great cushion up to hide my face. And then he turned and made a feint of getting an illustrated paper off the table. He kept his eye on the others. There was some little commotion, during which Betty had risen. She left the sofa and sat on the piano-stool. She was laughing excitedly.
The man came back to me with the illustrated paper. He sat down closer to me, and held the paper open for a shield. But he held it strangely, with his arm across the picture. The reading partwas in French. I had to crane to see over the top—Betty twisting round on the piano-stool, and touching the keys in a provoking way; the two men teasing her to sing.
I have lived over every instant of that hour, until the smallest detail is a stain indelible upon my mind. I have no trouble in remembering. My trouble is to be able to forget.
I hear again that muted voice behind the paper saying: "But for the collie-dog story, I wouldn't have dared to risk this. Everything depends on your nerve." And then he looked at me curiously, and wanted to know if I had not heard there were such places—— "I won't say like this. This is a masterpiece of devilry. And masterpieces are never plentiful."
He waited for me to say something. If I had known what, I could not have said it. I tried hard to speak. But I could only look dumbly in his face. And I saw there was no madness in the unhappy eyes.
"You must have heard or read of places ... where men and women meet," he insisted.
Then, with an immense effort, I managed to say that I didn't seem able to think. I had beenimagining other people insane. But perhaps it was I....
I stared over the top of the French paper, that he was both holding up and hiding from me. I thought to myself: "My mind is going." I must have said as much, for he answered quickly: "Not a bit of it! You've had a shock—that's all."
I did not realise it at the time, but, looking back, I seem to see the man's growing horror of my horror, and his fear I should betray him.
"I am sorry I told you," he said.
What was it he had told me? I asked him to help me to understand.
"You make it hard. That isn't fair," he said. "You give me a sense of violation. You implicate me, in spite of the quixotic resolve I made when you begged me not to go. You makeme, after all, an instrument of initiation."
Yes, he complained. Yet, looking back from the bleak height of later knowledge, I think he betrayed some relish of the moment. Heaven forgive me if I do him wrong! But he was not, I think, losing all that he had come for, or he would have shortened my agony. He was conscious,I think, of the excitement of finding himself, intellectually, on virgin ground. True, he was sacrificing what few of his sort would sacrifice. And he was running the gravest personal risk; for at some point I asked about that. "If she knew what you had told me, what would she do?"
"Call in her bullies to beat me to a jelly."
He was more and more unwilling to seem a mere adjunct of the baseness he unveiled. I was not to judge too harshly. "This situation"—he nodded towards Bettina, the old man, and the young one—"all this, far more crudely managed, is a commonplace in the world—in every capital of every nation on the earth. And it has always been so."
He saw I did not believe him. He seemed to imagine that, while I was being torn on the rack where he had stretched me, I could think of other things. I cried to him under my breath not to torture me any more—"help me quickly to get help!"
He said I must trust him. Everything depended on choosing the right moment. "If you went out now, with that face, you'd pull the house about our ears."
He was doing all he could to calm and steady me, he said. And certainly he tried to make me feel that what to me was like a maniac's nightmare, an abysmal horror beggaring language and crucifying thought—it was all a commonplace to men and women of the world. "Human nature!" "Human nature!"—like the tolling of a muffled bell. Bishops and old ladies imagined you could alter these things. Take India—"I've been there. I knew an official who'd had charge of the chaklas. You don't know what chaklas are? Your father knew. If you'd gone riding round any one of the cantonments you'd have seen. Little groups of tents. A hospital not far off. Women in the tents. Out there it's no secret. They're called "Government women." The women are needed by the army. So there they are."
Women are "needed." Through the chaos came back clear the memory of my talk with Betty in the train: "Men don't need us as much as we need them."
Even Governments, he said, had to recognise human nature, and shape their policies accordingly. I was too young to remember all that talkin the press some years ago, about the mysterious movements of British battleships in the Mediterranean. Instead of hanging about Malta, the ships had gone cruising round the Irish coast. Why? The officials said, for good and sufficient reasons. The chorus of criticism died down. The "reasons" were known to those who had to know. Not enough women at Malta. The British fleet spent some time about the Irish coasts. "Human nature——"
"I can do it now!" I cried under my breath, and I stood up.
He shot out a hand and pulled me back. "Christ! not while the grey hawk is hovering outside! And your lips are livid." A good thing, he said, that I had still a few minutes. "You have your sister to thank. She is a success. She piles up anticipation. The value of that, to the jaded, is the stock-in-trade of people like our hostess. At a time when her profession is a hundred per cent. more dangerous than it's ever been since the world began, she perfects it—makes it pay in proportion to its danger." Couldn't I trust him to know? He gave me his word: "No indecent haste here. They are adepts. They havelearned that the climax is less to the sated than the leading up. The leading up is all." After a second: "How did she get hold of you?"
I knew no more than the dead.
"Through someone very well informed...." He probed and questioned. I could only shake my head. But my tortured mind flung itself spasmodically from one figure to another in our little world, and felt each one's recoil from my mere unspoken thought. Until—the little dressmaker!Her questions ... her pains to establish the fact of our isolation, of our poverty ... her special interest in our aunt. "You haf a photografie—hein?" And then the picture's vanishing. Had it come to this house to serve as model? The Tartar liked "the new coiffure——"
Two servants came in. One carried a great silver tray.
"Oh, leave that a bit!" The Tartar, over the back of the sofa, waved the footman off.
They came towards us, and were told: "Put it there on the table." The man beside me made a show of welcoming it. He dropped the illustratedpaper on my lap. "Bend down—bend down low," he whispered.
I bent over the swimming page.
"What will you have?" he called out to me, as the footmen were leaving the room.
I tried to answer. No sound.
"Oh, you prefer crême de menthe, do you?" he said quite loud. "Yes, there's crême de menthe." He filled a glass and brought it to me. "Cognac," he whispered. "It will steady you."
I put my shaking lips to the glass. I did not drink.
"Ah, you are afraid," he said. And he looked at me with his unhappy eyes.
My hand was shaking. Some of the stuff spilt out on my new dress.
"Give it to me," he said, and he drank it off—"just to show" me.
I was conscious that Betty was singing—And that the door had opened. The Grey Hawk stood there with, as I thought at first, a thick-set boy dressed in a man's evening clothes. As she dismissed him I saw he was a hunchback. She shut the door behind the hunchback and the Colonel left the piano and came towards her.He was laughing. They stood and talked.
"Bend down. Bend low——" the voice said in my ear.
The Colonel's croaking laugh came nearer.
The man at my side called out: "Look here, Colonel. No poaching on my preserves. We are deep in a discussion about Art. You're not to interrupt."
"Oh, Art is it?" The old man had come behind our sofa, and was leaning down between us. I smelt a foul breath. With a sense of choking I lifted my head. The Colonel's watery eyes went from me to the strange ugly picture in the illustrated paper. I did not understand it. I do not think I would have been conscious of having looked at it, but for the expression on the Colonel's face.
Bettina finished her song. They all clapped. In the buzz, Bettina raised her voice. No, no. She couldn't dance, and sing, as well as accompany herself, she said.
"What time is it in?" the grey woman asked. She took Bettina's place at the piano.
Still Bettina hesitated, while The Tartar urged.
"Oh,Idon't mind," Bettina said, "if you like such babyish songs."
"Of course we do,"—the Colonel went back to them.
Bettina said pertly: "I should think you'd be ashamed." She stood beside the grey woman and hummed the old tune. She helped by striking a few notes.
"Now!" the grey woman said to Betty.
The word was echoed in my ear.
"Now?" I repeated.
"But first"—he caught my hand. "Bite your lip a little.... Ah! not blood." He smuggled his handkerchief to me behind the cushion. "You'll be all right," he whispered. "But I wish I could go with you! You see that I must stay behind——"
"Yes, oh yes," I looked at Betty.
"I must stay," he said, "to give you time. Then when I've seen you out of this ... a door open, a door shut—and I shall never see you again...."
"Now!Now!" I hardly noticed that he took his blood-stained handkerchief out of my hand. For Bettina had come forward and stood poised,holding her green skirt with both hands, like a child about to curtsey. I stood up. All the room was dancing with my little sister. I got to the door.
"Where are you going to...?"
Betty sang. But she was too amused and excited to notice me.
My companion had crossed the room, and was bending over the Grey Hawk. She looked round at him surprised, mocking....
Some power came to help me across the threshold. A footman started up out of the floor and stood before me. "Where are you going?" He echoed Betty.
"I am waiting for—one of the gentlemen," I said, and I steadied myself against a chair. If Betty's song stopped, I should know we had failed.
I held my breath, as I leaned over and took my last look into the room. Our friend was leaving the grey woman. She played on. Bettina was dancing, a hand on her hip, the other twirling moustachios—playing the gallant. Such a baby she looked!
And I had done her hair like that——
"What is your fortune, my pretty maid?"
The man had come out and softly shut the door. He gave the footman a strange look and passed him something. "It's all right," he said.
The footman looked in his hand and stared. "Mais, merci—merci, monsieur." He vanished.
I went towards the stairs.
"That'snot the way," the voice said harshly.
"Shan't I get a cloak——"
"For God's sake, no! It's a question of moments now." He was undoing the door. "Run for your life. First to the left—second to the right—a cab-rank."
I fled out of the house.
I stood ringing. I thundered at the knocker.
I beat the door with my fist.
An old man opened at last.
"Mrs. Harborough! Where is she?" The old man tried to keep me out. But he was gentle and frail. I forced my way past. I called and ran along a passage, trying doors that opened into the darkness.
At last! A room where a woman sat alone—reading by a shaded light.
"Who are you?" I cried out. She laid her book in her lap. "AreyouMrs. Harborough? Then come—come quickly ... I'll tell you on the way——"
The old woman lifted the folds of her double chin and looked at me through spectacles.
"You must come and help me to get Bettina...." I broke into distracted sobbing on the name. "Bettina——! Bettina——!" I seized the lady's hand and tried to draw her out of her chair.
But I was full of trembling. She sat there massive, calm, with a power of inert resistance, that made me feel I could as easily drag her house out of the Square by its knocker, as move the woman planted there in her chair.
Neither haste nor perturbation in the voice that asked me: "What has happened?"
"Not yet!" I cried out. "Nothing has happened yet! But we must be quick. Oh, God, let us be quick——"
The butler had followed me in and was asking something. "Yes," said the quiet voice, "pay the cabman."
"No!" I shrieked. "Keep him! I must go back, instantly...." And through my own strange-sounding voice, hers reached me.
"You must see that you are quite unintelligible. Sit down and collect yourself."
"Sit down! Isn't it enough thatonewoman sits still, while—while——"
She was putting questions.
I heard a reproach that seemed to fill the house: "You never came to meet us!"
And while the charge was ringing I felt, with anguish, the injustice of it. How could one have expected this woman to come!
But she should be moved and stirred at last!
"I sent my maid," she was defending herself, "—only a minute or two late."
"The other woman was not late!"
"Who?"
I begged the butler to get a cloak for Mrs. Harborough. She was saying Bettina and I should have waited. And again that I must calm myself and tell her——
"Someone pretended to be you!" I hurled it at her. "She took us to a house—a place where they do worse than murder. Betty is there now——" I told her all I could pack into a few sentences.
"It isn't possible," my aunt said. "This is England."
"Come and see!Betty——" But they only thought me mad; they tortured me with questions.
I caught her by the arm. "God won't forgive you if you wait an instant more."
Oh, but she was old and unbelieving! So old, I felt she had looked on unmoved at evil since the world began.
But she was sending for wraps, sending messages. Still she sat there, in the heavy, square-backed chair, her hands upon her knees, her twofeet side by side as motionless as the footstool, her heavy shoulders high and square, her lace cap with square ends falling either side her face, like the head-dress of an Egyptian, her air of monumental calm more like a Theban statue than a living woman.
I turned away.
The figure in the chair rose up at last.
Oh, but slowly—slow, and stiff, and ponderous.
I felt in her all the heaviness of the acquiescent since Time began.
"That is right," she said to the old man who had brought the maid.
And the maid was old, too.
Three helpless ghosts.
Like death the sense came over me that I was as badly off with these three, as I had been alone. Again I turned from them, frantic.
"I will go out," I cried, "and find help." I ran towards the door.
It was then the old man made the first sane suggestion. We could telephone to the police.
That would save time! The police would meet us outside Betty's prison.
I followed the butler into the hall. We all stood there, by the telephone. Ages seemed to go by while he was getting the number. And when he had got the number, he could not hear the questions that were put. I tore the receiver out of his hand—I pushed him aside. But I had never used the telephone before, and I spoke too loudly. When they told me so, I sobbed. The voice at the other end was faint and cool. Oh, the easy way the world was taking Betty's fate!
And then the faint cool voice at the other end said something which showed me I was not believed.
He, too, was thinking I was out of my mind.
The receiver dropped from my hand.
"They cannot understand," I said. I told Mrs. Harborough that she must go to Bettina, and I would bring the police.
Some objection was made. I did not stop to hear it: "I cannot wait for any words! And I will not wait another second for any human soul!"
Then, running beside me as I made for the front door, the old butler spoke again: "——apoliceman in our square." He would call the policeman in.
The old man was right. A policeman stood at the corner, watching that no harm should come to the ladies of Lowndes Square.
I had run out, with the butler protesting at my heels: "Not in the street, miss!" he said, with the first hint of emotion I had found in him.
I did not wait; but he must have brought the policeman in during my outpouring, for the look of the hall during those swift seconds is stamped on my brain. The elderly maid kneeling at her mistress's feet, changing her shoes; the policeman facing my aunt, helmet in hand, his reverent eye falling before the dignity of Mrs. Harborough, while I, at his elbow, poured out broken sentences, interlarded with: "I'll tell you the rest as we go——"
My strained voice was grown weak. I wondered, suddenly, if it had ever really reached their ears.
I was like a person down under the sea, trying to make my voice heard through a mile of murky water.
I was like a woman buried alive, who, in the black middle of the night, beats at her coffin-lid in some deserted graveyard.
"It is no use!" I cried. "I shall go back alone."
At last we were all going out of the door. The policeman put on his helmet.
"And where is this house?" he asked.
"It is—it is——"
A pit of blackness opened. I felt myself falling headlong. I heard a cry that made my flesh writhe—as though the cry had been Bettina's, and not mine.
A voice said: "It is not possible you have forgotten the address!"
I had never known it!
It must have been half an hour before reason came back. A strange man was there, lean and grey. A friend, I heard—a Healer.
All those old, old faces!
What had they done?
What could they do?—except telephone again to the police the vague and non-committal fact of a girl decoyed and lost to sight in the labyrinth of London.
They dared to think they could get me to bed. They found me, not a girl—more a wild animal!
Out, out I must go.
The outward struggle was matched by the one in my mind. Where should I go? To whom? There must be somebody who would care. Somebody who had Power to give effect to caring. Wildly my ignorance cast about. Who had Power?
The King—yes; and surely the Queen would "care." But who was I to reach the Queen? Her sentinels and servants would thrust me out.All my crying would never reach the Queen. Then, the only thing that was left was for me to go out and cry the horror in the street.
They held the door while they told me there had been telephoning back and forth. And someone had already gone to Alton Street.
"Is that where Betty is?"
No. Alton Street was the nearest police-station. The person who had been sent there had not yet come back.
Then I, too, must go to Alton Street to learn what they were doing.
The power of the police still loomed immense. At Alton Street I would hear they had already found Betty. She might even be there at this moment....
My aunt, the Healer and I driving through deserted streets. How long was it since I had been away from Bettina?
"Oh, not long," they said. And the police beyond a doubt had turned the time to good account.
I had a vision of the Betty I should find atAlton Street. Fainting, ministered to by men, reverent of her youth and terror....
A grimy room with a counter running down its length. No sign of Betty; only men in uniform grouped in twos and threes behind the counter.
They listened. Yes, my aunt's messenger "had been in." They shook their heads.
The Healer did most of the talking.
A man with a sallow face put a question now and then. He was the inspector.
Although there were only policemen there besides ourselves, the inspector talked quite low, as though he was afraid someone might come to know a girl was lost.
"I can't hear what you are saying!" I said. "She ismysister. You must tell me what you are doing to find her."
They had so little to go upon. "The only clue, and that a very slight one," was the cabman. Could I remember what he was like?
The strangeness of the question! Taxi-drivers were as much alike to country eyes as the cabs they drove—— But why ask me? "Bring the man in, and let the inspector see him."
Then they told me. The man who was waiting there outside was not the one who had taken me to Lowndes Square.
But wherewasour "slight and only clue"?
They said that while they all were busied over me, unconscious, the butler had paid the cabman and let him go. He had never thought to take the number. The slight, the only clue, was lost.
But no. The inspector said they would circulate an inquiry for a cabman who had brought a young lady of my description to Lowndes Square that night.
I tried to learn how long this would take—what we could do meanwhile. What had been already done.
They seemed to be saying things which had no meaning. Except one thing. The great difficulty was that I could not describe the outside of the house, nor even the general locality. Which way had we driven from Victoria?
I had no idea.
But surely I had looked about. What had I noticed as we drove away from the station?
I do not know whether at another time I might have answered better, but I could remember only a confused crowd of passengers, porters, taxi-cabs, and motors. Yes, and the woman who had looked after us while she asked her way of a policeman.
Why had she looked after us?
I could no more tell them that than I could tell why both she and the policeman had followed us with such unfriendly eyes.
"Ah!"—the inspector exchanged glances with the Healer—"a possible clue there."
I could not imagine what he meant. I could not believe that he meant anything when I saw the expressionless yellow face turned to Mrs. Harborough to say that "in any case" the Victoria policeman would not be on duty now. The inspector talked about what they would do to-morrow.
"To-night—to-night; what can we do to-night?"
He brought a piece of yellow paper. He put the questions over again, and this time he wrote the answers down with a stump of worn lead-pencil. The glazed paper was like the man, ittook impressions grudgingly; it held them very faint.
While the blunt lead-pencil laboured across the sheet, something that other man had said to me in the house of horror flashed back across my mind. I had not believed him at the time, still less now, in the presence of the guardians of the City—all these grave and decent people.
Shamefaced I asked Mrs. Harborough if the inspector knew of "any house where a woman takes young girls."
She and all the rest were one as silent as the other, till I steadied my voice to say again, this time to the man himself: "You have no knowledge, then, of 'such a place'?"
"I don't say that," he answered.
I looked at him bewildered. "You mean you do know of a house—a house where——"
He hesitated too. "We know some," he said.
"You don't mean there are many?"
Again the hesitation. "Not many of the sort you describe." He took up the stump of pencil hurriedly and held it poised. "Try to recollect some landmark," he said—"some building, some statue that you passed."
I did my best to obey—to wrench my mind away from the inside of that place where Betty was ... to think of what we had seen on the way.
"Did you drive through the Park?" said my aunt.
"No," the inspector answered for me, "she wouldn't take them through the Park; she would go as fast as possible—by side streets——"
But I told them we had passed the Park. We had seen flower-beds through a tall iron railing. She said it was Hyde Park, and the flowers were on our left.
"Hamilton Place. Park Lane." The inspector punctuated my phrases. "Driving north. You crossed Oxford Street?"
I could not say. Other questions, too, I had no answer for. I held my head between my hands trying to force the later impressions out—trying to recover something of that drive I seemed to have taken a hundred years ago in some other state of being. And as I stood so, sobbing inwardly and praying God to let me remember, I heard the inspector say the most horrible thing of all. And it was the horrible thing that gave mea moment of hope. He told my aunt that the police kept a list of "these houses."
A list.
He said the police were "expected to have an eye on such places." And no one contradicted him.
"Even if there are many," I burst out—"you have all these policemen here. You have hundreds more. Those houses in the list must all be searched——"
They would do what they could, he said.
I did not know why they should at the same time speak of doing all they could, and yet should look so hopeless. But I saw that nobody moved. My two companions talked in undertones. The men in uniform still stood in twos and threes. One near a high desk drummed with his fingers on an open book. The Healer folded his thin long hands upon the counter. In that horrible stillness I said suddenly, "Look at the clock!" The clock's hands too were folded, praying people to notice it was midnight.
They stirred a little at my voice. They looked at me and at the clock. The inspector said they were waiting for Mrs. Harborough's messenger.The messenger had gone out with a constable to make inquiry at the nearest cab shelter.
Why had they not told us that before!
My two companions followed me, talking low.
We were driven to a little wooden house, set close against the curb. Two or three men inside, and one behind an urn was pouring coffee.
Yes, yes, a gentleman had "called." Each one there had been questioned. Others, besides, who had been in and out. No one had taken a lady to Lowndes Square that night.
The door shut behind us. We were out again, in the street.
Two taxi-cabs in the rank, and ours at the curb? Besides our driver and ourselves not a soul afoot, outside the little wooden shelter. Betty—Betty, what am I to do? I looked up at the houses. In almost any one of them must be some good man, who, if he knew, would help me. But the houses were curtained, and dark.
The silence of the streets seemed a deeper silence than any the country knows. The only sound, my two companions whispering. "He" would no doubt be waiting for them at LowndesSquare, they said. Could they mean, then, to go home...?
Betty—Betty—— I looked up again at the houses—houses of great folk, I felt sure. Officials, perhaps; equerries; people about the Court—people whose names we had often seen in the paper as going here and there with the King and Queen. People who would not be turned back at any time of night if they went to the Palace on an errand of life and death. Should I run along the street ringing at all the bells?
I may have made some movement, for Mrs. Harborough took my arm and drew me towards the cab. No, the people in the great houses would be sleeping too far away from those blank doors. Deafness had fallen on the world, and on the houses of good men a great darkness.
A light—at last, a light! shining out of a house on a far corner which had been masked by the cab shelter. And people awake there, for a taxi waited at the door—the door of hope. Above it an electric burner made a square of brightness. In that second of tense listening, my foot on the step of the cab, a raised voice reached me faintly.
I dragged my arm free and went, blind and stumbling, towards the sound. I shall find someone to go to the Queen...!
The Healer had followed quickly: "What are you doing! That's a public-house."
They took me back, they put me in the cab. I hardly knew why I resisted, except that I was looking wildly about for someone to appeal to, and I kept childishly repeating: "The Queen ... the Queen."
While Mrs. Harborough was being helped into the cab after me, I leaned out of the window on the opposite side, looking up the street and down. The wind blew cold on my wet face.
"The Queen, the Queen! Oh, why are you Queen of England, if you can't help Betty?"
The door of the public-house opened, and a man reeled out. A man in chauffeur's dress. A man—with crooked shoulders!
I remembered now.
I opened the cab-door on my side, and tore across the street with voices calling after me.
The unsteady figure had stooped down by the waiting taxi, and set the machinery whirring.
"Tell me," I bent over him. "Are you theman who brought me to Lowndes Square an hour or so ago?"
The man looked up. As the cab light fell on his face I recognised him.
Oh, God, the relief!
"Take me back! Take me to the place you brought me from," I cried to the stooping figure.
The others had come up. The chauffeur was vague and mumbling. He was drunk enough to be stubborn, cautious. But money quickened him.
He had picked me up, he said, "in one of the streets...." he couldn't say positively which, and he mentioned several. It might be any one of them; but it wasn't far from St. John's Wood Station.
In spite of the man's condition I wanted to get into his cab. I had a horror of losing him.
"I have taken his number," the Healer said, as though that were enough.
And all the while—— But we are coming, Betty! Coming....
The other driver had been summoned. I heard the names of streets and of police-stations. They settled which would be the one.
"Will you drive very fast?" I asked. "Iwill give you all I have if you'll drive fast."
The drunken chauffeur followed us in his swerving, rocking cab. I leaned out of the window all the way, weeping, praying. And I never took my eyes away from the only clue.
Minutes and minutes went by. I seemed to have spent my life hanging out of a taxi window, watching a drunken driver steer his uneven course. He ran up on a curbstone, and the cab tilted. Then it righted, and came on at a terrific pace, almost to capsize again as it turned the abrupt corner, which we ourselves had rounded just before we stopped. I looked up, and saw a light burning in a lantern above an open door.
The room we went into was smaller than the one at Alton Street.
And Betty wasn't there.
Only one man, standing at a high desk. An honest-looking, fresh-coloured man; but quite young. When the others began telling him why we had come I broke in: "This is not an ordinary thing. We must see the inspector."
The young man said he was the inspector.
Among us we told him.
The drunken cabman, almost sober, spoke quite differently. Sensible, alert. Now something would be done! I no longer regretted the youth of the inspector. This man was human.
"You will bring 'the List' and come with us at once?"
I was told he could not come. An inspector must stay at his post. An inspector's post was the station.
But I clung to the hope he had inspired. What had he turned away for with that brisk air? My eyes went on before him, looking for the telephone he must be going to use; or an electric bell that should sound some great alarum, summoning a legion of police.
He had come back; he stood before us holding in his hand a piece of yellow paper. Precisely such a piece of paper as that on which already, there in Alton Street, the miserable story was set down. I shall not be believed, but this man, too, began to write on the glazed surface with a stump of blunt lead-pencil.
"Don'twait to write it all again!" I prayed. "Telephone for help...."
But he, too, made little of the need for haste.He, too, made much of what I had noticed as we left Victoria—the homely woman and the policeman watching as we drove away.
"You think," Mrs. Harborough said, "that the woman was suspicious?"
"No doubt—and no doubt the policeman was suspicious too." The inspector spoke with pride: "Oh, we get to know those people! They meet the trains. They're at the docks when ships come in."
It was then I saw that Mrs. Harborough could be stirred too. "If the policeman knew," she said—"if he so much as suspected, why did he not stop the motor?"
The inspector shook his head.
"Why didn't he arrest the woman?"
"He is not allowed," said the inspector.
I was sure he couldn't be telling us the truth. A creeping despair came over me. My first impression had been right. This man was too young, too ignorant, to help in such appalling trouble as ours. He was speaking kindly still. I might be sure they would do all they could to discover the house——
"When? When?"
And if they did discover it, he said, they would watch it.
"'Watch it!'" I could not think I had heard right. "You don't mean stand outside and wait!—while all the time inside——"
They tried to make me calmer. The inspector said, under certain circumstances, a warrant could be obtained to search the house....
And was the warrant ready?
Everything possible would be done. Oh, the times they said that! Then the inspector, a little wearied, told Mrs. Harborough "it might be advisable to go and see the man who is in charge of all these cases."
Not only I, Mrs. Harborough heard him. For she repeated, "'All these cases!' You don't mean such a thing has happened before?"
"Oh, yes," the young man said. "But usually it's poor girls. This is the gentleman who has charge of all that." He turned and pointed to the left. Beyond a board where keys were hanging, under two crossed swords, the electric light shone clear on the picture of a man in an officer's uniform. A man wearing a sword and a cocked hat with plume—the sort of dress Lord Helmstone wore when he went to the King's Levée.
"When is he here?" Mrs. Harborough asked.
"Oh, he never comes here. He's at Scotland Yard."
"Scotland!" I cried.
They told me Scotland Yard was in London.
Then we'll go to Scotland Yard!
He wouldn't be at Scotland Yard now. "Hemightbe there in the morning" ... this man, in charge of all such cases!
The young inspector spoke his superior's name with awe. Oh, a person very great and powerful, and his hand was on his sword. I put my empty hands over my face and wept aloud.
Betty—Betty—who will help us?
I did not need their foolish words to realise, at last, that I should have as much help (now, when help was any good)—as much help from the sword in the picture as from this man with three stripes on his sleeve and the blunt lead-pencil in his hand.
Who was there in all the world who really cared?
A vision of my mother rose to stab at me.
No other friend? Eric!—as far away as heaven.
The inspector and the man in leather were lifting me into a cab. The electric light was fierce in their faces. Then the light and they were gone. We were driving in silence through streets of shadow sharply streaked with light. I crouched in the corner, and fought the flames that shrivelled up my flesh.
Torment! Torment!
Betty with a hundred faces. And every one a separate agony. Betty beginning to understand. Betty looking for her sister—calling out for me. No sister! No friend! Only the fiends of hell!
Torment! Torment!
I was crying fiercely again, and beating with clenched fists. I heard a crash.
The cab was stopped, and strange faces crowded. I was being held. "She has lost her mind," one said.
But no, it wasn't lost! It was serving me with devilish clearness. More pictures, and still more.
Well, well—Betty would die soon!
Like cool water—holy water—came the thought of death. Perhaps she was already dead. Oh, my God, make it true! Let her be dead!
Here was healing at last. Betty was dead!