Part 21 (1/2)

”No, I don't want you,” said Emmy absently. ”Why should I?”

And she gazed stonily at the suburban murk of the great city until they reached Victoria. There, a dejected four-wheeled cab with a drooping horse stood solitary on the rank--a depressing object. Emmy s.h.i.+vered at the sight.

”I can't stand it. Drive me to my door. I know I'm a beast, Septimus dear, but I am grateful. I am, really.”

The cab received them into its musty interior and drove them through the foggy brown of a London winter dawn. Unimaginable cheerlessness enveloped them. The world wore an air of disgust at having to get up on such a morning. The atmosphere for thirty yards around them was clear enough, with the clearness of yellow consomme, but ahead it stood thick, like a puree of bad vegetables. They pa.s.sed through Belgravia, and the white-blinded houses gave an impression of universal death, and the empty streets seemed waiting for the doors to open and the mourners to issue forth. The cab, too, had something of the sinister, in that it was haunted by the ghosts of a fourpenny cigar and a sixpenny bottle of scent which continued a lugubrious flirtation; and the windows rattled a _danse macabre_. At last it pulled up at the door of Emmy's Mansions in Chelsea.

She looked at him very piteously, like a frightened child. Her pretty mouth was never strong, but when the corners drooped it was babyish. She slipped her hand in his.

”Don't leave me just yet. It's silly, I know--but this awful journey has taken everything out of me. Every bit of it has been worse than the last.

Edith--that's my maid--will light a fire--you must get warm before you start--and she'll make some coffee. Oh, do come. You can keep the cab.”

”But what will your maid think?” asked Septimus, who for all his vagueness had definite traditions as to the proprieties of life.

”What does it matter? What does anything in this ghastly world matter? I'm frightened, Septimus, horribly frightened. I daren't go up by myself. Oh!

Come!”

Her voice broke on the last word. Saint Anthony would have yielded; also his pig. Septimus handed her out of the cab, and telling the cabman to wait, followed her through the already opened front door of the Mansions up to her flat. She let herself in with her latchkey and showed him into the drawing-room, turning on the electric light as he entered.

”I'll go and wake Edith,” she said. ”Then we can have some breakfast. The fire's laid. Do you mind putting a match to it?”

She disappeared and Septimus knelt down before the grate and lit the paper.

In a second or two the flame caught the wood, and, the blower being down, it blazed fiercely. He spread his ice-cold hands out before it, incurious of the futile little room whose draperies and fripperies and inconsiderable flimsiness of furniture proclaimed its owner, intent only on the elemental need of warmth. He was disturbed by the tornadic entrance of Emmy.

”She's not here!” she exclaimed tragically. Her baby face was white and there were dark shadows under the eyes which stared at him with a touch of madness. ”She's not here!”

”Perhaps she has gone out for a walk,” Septimus suggested, as if London serving-maids were in the habit of taking the air at eight o'clock on a foggy morning.

But Emmy heard him not. The dismaying sense of utter loneliness smote her down. It was the last straw. Edith, on whom she had staked all her hopes of physical comfort, was not there. Overstrained in body, nerves, and mind, she sank helplessly in the chair which Septimus set out for her before the fire, too exhausted to cry. She began to speak in a queer, toneless voice:

”I don't know what to do. Edith could have helped me. I want to get away and hide. I can't stay here. It's the first place Zora will come to. She mustn't find me. Edith has been through it herself. She would have taken me somewhere abroad or in the country where I could have stayed in hiding till it was over. It was all so sudden--the news of his marriage. I was half crazy, I couldn't make plans. I thought Edith would help me. Now she has gone, goodness knows where. My G.o.d, what shall I do?”

She went on, looking at him haggardly, a creature driven beyond the reticence of s.e.x, telling her inmost secret to a man as if it were a commonplace of trouble. It did not occur to her distraught mind that he was a man. She spoke to herself, without thought, uttering the cry for help that had been pent within her all that awful night.

The puzzledom of Septimus grew unbearable in its intensity; then suddenly it burst like a skyrocket and a blinding rain of fire enveloped him. He stood paralyzed with pain and horror.

The sullen morning light diffused itself through the room, mingling ironically with the pretty glow cast by the pink-shaded electric globes, while the two forlorn grotesques regarded each other, unconscious of each other's grotesqueness, the girl disheveled and haggard, the man with rough gray coat unb.u.t.toned, showing the rumpled evening dress; her toque miserably awry, his black tie riding above his collar, the bow somewhere behind his ear. And the tragedy of tragedies of a young girl's life was unfolded.

”My G.o.d, what am I to do?”

Septimus stared at her, his hands in his trousers pockets. In one of them his fingers grasped a folded bit of paper. He drew it out unthinkingly--a very dirty bit of paper. In his absent-minded way he threw it towards the fire, but it fell on the tiled hearth. In moments of great strain the mind seizes with pitiful eagerness on the trivial. Emmy looked at the paper.

Something familiar about its shape struck her. She leaned forward, picked it up and unfolded it.

”This is a check,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone. ”Did you mean to throw it away?”

He took it from her and, looking at it, realized that It was Clem Sypher's check for two hundred pounds.

”Thanks,” said he, thrusting it into his overcoat pocket.