At the luncheon-table conversation proceeded fitfully. Rodney said that this morning he could have sworn it was going to rain, and Jane said she had thought so, too, and Rodney said that now it looked as if the weather might hold up, and Jane said Yes, didn’t it? and Rodney said he hoped the weather would hold up because rain was such a nuisance, and Jane said Yes, wasn’t it? Rodney said yesterday had been a nice day, and Jane said Yes, and Rodney said that it seemed to be getting a little warmer, and Jane said Yes, and Rodney said that summer would be here any moment now, and Jane said Yes, wouldn’t it? and Rodney said he hoped it would not be too hot this summer, but that, as a matter of fact, when you came right down to it, what one minded was not so much the heat as the humidity, and Jane said Yes, didn’t one?
In short, by the time they rose and left the restaurant, not a word had been spoken that could have provoked the censure of the sternest critic. Yet William Bates, catching sight of them as they passed down the aisle, started as if he had been struck by lightning. He had happened to find himself near the Alcazar at lunch-time and had dropped in for a chop; and, peering round the pillar which had hidden his table from theirs, he stared after them with saucer-like eyes.
“Oh, dash it!” said William.
This William Bates, as I have indicated in my previous references to him, was not an abnormally emotional or temperamental man. Built physically on the lines of a motor-lorry, he had much of that vehicle’s placid and even phlegmatic outlook on life. Few things had the power to ruffle William, but, unfortunately, it so happened that one of these things was Rodney Spelvin. He had never been able entirely to overcome his jealousy of this man. It had been Rodney who had come within an ace of scooping Jane from him in the days when she had been Miss Packard. It had been Rodney who had temporarily broken up his home some years later by persuading Jane to become a member of the artistic set. And now, unless his eyes jolly well deceived him, this human gumboil was once more busy on his dastardly work. Too dashed thick, was William’s view of the matter; and he gnashed his teeth in such a spasm of resentful fury that a man lunching at the next table told the waiter to switch off the electric fan, as it had begun to creak unendurably.
Jane was reading in the drawing-room when William reached home that night.
“Had a nice day?” asked William.
“Quite nice,” said Jane.
“Play golf?” asked William.
“Just practised,” said Jane.
“Lunch at the club?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I saw that bloke Spelvin in town,” said William.
Jane wrinkled her forehead.
“Spelvin? Oh, you mean Rodney Spelvin? Did you? I see he’s got a new book coming out.”
“You never run into him these days, do you?”
“Oh no. It must be two years since I saw him.”
“Oh?” said William. “Well, I’ll be going upstairs and dressing.”
It seemed to Jane, as the door closed, that she heard a curious clicking noise, and she wondered for a moment if little Braid had got out of bed and was playing with the Mah-Jongg counters. But it was only William gnashing his teeth.
There is nothing sadder in this life than the spectacle of a husband and wife with practically identical handicaps drifting apart; and to dwell unnecessarily on such a spectacle is, to my mind, ghoulish. It is not my purpose, therefore, to weary you with a detailed description of the hourly widening of the breach between this once ideally united pair. Suffice it to say that within a few days of the conversation just related the entire atmosphere of this happy home had completely altered. On the Tuesday, William excused himself from the morning round on the plea that he had promised Peter Willard a match, and Jane said What a pity! On Tuesday afternoon William said that his head ached, and Jane said Isn’t that too bad? On Wednesday morning William said he had lumbago, and Jane, her sensitive feelings now deeply wounded, said Oh, had he? After that, it came to be agreed between them by silent compact that they should play together no more.
Also, they began to avoid one another in the house. Jane would sit in the drawing-room, while William retired down the passage to his den. In short, if you had added a couple of ikons and a photograph of Trotsky, you would have had a mise en scène which would have fitted a Russian novel like the paper on the wall.
One evening, about a week after the beginning of this tragic state of affairs, Jane was sitting in the drawing-room, trying to read Braid on Taking Turf. But the print seemed blurred and the philosophy too metaphysical to be grasped. She laid the book down and stared sadly before her.
Every moment of these black days had affected Jane like a stymie on the last green. She could not understand how it was that William should have come to suspect, but that he did suspect was plain; and she writhed on the horns of a dilemma. All she had to do to win him back again was to go to him and tell him of Anastatia’s fatal entanglement. But what would happen then? Undoubtedly he would feel it his duty as a brother to warn the girl against Rodney Spelvin; and Jane instinctively knew that William warning anyone against Rodney Spelvin would sound like a private of the line giving his candid opinion of the sergeant-major.
Inevitably, in this case, Anastatia, a spirited girl and deeply in love, would take offence at his words and leave the house. And if she left the house, what would be the effect on little Braid’s mashie-play? Already, in less than a fortnight, the gifted girl had taught him more about the chip-shot from ten to fifteen yards off the green than the local pro. had been able to do in two years. Her departure would be absolutely disastrous.
What it amounted to was that she must sacrifice her husband’s happiness or her child’s future; and the problem of which was to get the loser’s end was becoming daily more insoluble.
She was still brooding on it when the postman arrived with the evening mail, and the maid brought the letters into the drawing-room.
Jane sorted them out. There were three for William, which she gave to the maid to take to him in his den. There were two for herself, both bills. And there was one for Anastatia, in the well-remembered handwriting of Rodney Spelvin.
Jane placed this letter on the mantelpiece, and stood looking at it like a cat at a canary. Anastatia was away for the day, visiting friends who lived a few stations down the line; and every womanly instinct in Jane urged her to get hold of a kettle and steam the gum off the envelope. She had almost made up her mind to disembowel the thing and write “Opened in error” on it, when the telephone suddenly went off like a bomb and nearly startled her into a decline. Coming at that moment it sounded like the Voice of Conscience.
“Hullo?” said Jane.
“Hullo!” replied a voice.
Jane clucked like a hen with uncontrollable emotion. It was Rodney.
“It that you?” asked Rodney.
“Yes,” said Jane.
And so it was, she told herself.
“Your voice is like music,” said Rodney.
This may or may not have been the case, but at any rate it was exactly like every other female voice when heard on the telephone. Rodney prattled on without a suspicion.
“Have you got my letter yet?”
“No,” said Jane. She hesitated. “What was in it?” she asked, tremulously.
“It was to ask you to come to my house tomorrow at four.”
“To your house!” faltered Jane.
“Yes. Everything is ready. I will send the servants out, so that we shall be quite alone. You will come, won’t you?”
The room was shimmering before Jane’s eyes, but she regained command of herself with a strong effort.
“Yes,” she said. “I will be there.”
She spoke softly, but there was a note of menace in her voice. Yes, she would indeed be there. From the very moment when this man had made his monstrous proposal, she had been asking herself what Gloria Gooch would have done in a crisis like this. And the answer was plain. Gloria Gooch, if her sister-in-law was intending to visit the apartments of a
libertine, would have gone there herself to save the poor child from the consequences of her infatuated folly.
“Yes,” said Jane, “I will be there.”
“You have made me the happiest man in the world,” said Rodney. “I will meet you at the corner of the street at four, then.” He paused. “What is that curious clicking noise?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said Jane. “I noticed it myself. Something wrong with the wire, I suppose.”
“I thought it was somebody playing the castanets. Until tomorrow, then, good-bye.”
“Good-bye.”
Jane replaced the receiver. And William, who had been listening to every word of the conversation on the extension in his den, replaced his receiver, too.
Anastatia came back from her visit late that night. She took her letter, and read it without comment. At breakfast next morning she said that she would be compelled to go into town that day.
“I want to see my dressmaker,” she said.
“I’ll come, too,” said Jane. “I want to see my dentist.”
“So will I,” said William. “I want to see my lawyer.”
“That will be nice,” and Anastatia, after a pause.
“Very nice,” said Jane, after another pause.
“We might all lunch together,” said Anastatia. “My appointment is not till four.”
“I should love it,” said Jane. “My appointment is at four, too.”
“So is mine,” said William.
“What a coincidence!” said Jane, trying to speak brightly.
“Yes,” said William. He may have been trying to speak brightly, too; but, if so, he failed. Jane was too young to have seen Salvini in Othello, but, had she witnessed that great tragedian’s performance, she could not have failed to be struck by the resemblance between his manner in the pillow scene and William’s now.
“Then shall we all lunch together?” said Anastatia.
“I shall lunch at my club,” said William curtly.
“William seems to have a grouch,” said Anastatia.
“Ha!” said William.
He raised his fork and drove it with sickening violence at his sausage.
So Jane had a quiet little woman’s lunch at a confectioner’s alone with Anastatia. Jane ordered a tongue-and-lettuce sandwich, two macaroons, marsh-mallows, gingerale and cocoa; and Anastatia ordered pineapple chunks with whipped cream, tomatoes stuffed with beetroot, three dill pickles, a raspberry nut sundae, and hot chocolate. And, while getting outside this garbage, they talked merrily, as women will, of every subject but the one that really occupied their minds. When Anastatia got up and said good-bye with a final reference to her dressmaker, Jane shuddered at the depths of deceit to which the modern girl can sink.
It was now about a quarter to three, so Jane had an hour to kill before going to the rendezvous. She wandered about the streets, and never had time appeared to her to pass so slowly, never had a city been so congested with hard-eyed and suspicious citizens. Every second person she met seemed to glare at her as if he or she had guessed her secret.
The very elements joined in the general disapproval. The sky had turned a sullen grey, and far-away thunder muttered faintly, like an impatient golfer held up on the tee by a slow foursome. It was a relief when at length she found herself at the back of Rodney Spelvin’s house, standing before the scullery window, which it was her intention to force with the pocket-knife won in happier days as second prize in a competition at a summer hotel for those with handicaps above eighteen.
But the relief did not last long. Despite the fact that she was about to enter this evil house with the best motives, a sense of almost intolerable guilt oppressed her. If William should ever get to know of this! Wow! felt Jane.
How long she would have hesitated before the window, one cannot say. But at this moment, glancing guiltily round, she happened to catch the eye of a cat which was sitting on a near-by wall, and she read in this cat’s eye such cynical derision that the urge came upon her to get out of its range as quickly as possible. It was a cat that had manifestly seen a lot of life, and it was plainly putting an entirely wrong construction on her behaviour. Jane shivered, and, with a quick jerk prised the window open and climbed in.
It was two years since she had entered this house, but once she had reached the hall she remembered its topography perfectly. She mounted the stairs to the large studio sitting-room on the first floor, the scene of so many Bohemian parties in that dark period of her artistic life. It was here, she knew, that Rodney would bring his victim.
The studio was one of those dim, over-ornamented rooms which appeal to men like Rodney Spelvin. Heavy curtains hung in front of the windows. One corner was cut off by a high-backed Chesterfield. At the far end was an alcove, curtained like the windows. Once Jane had admired this studio, but now it made her shiver. It seemed to her one of those nests in which, as the sub-title of Tried in the Furnace had said, only eggs of evil are hatched. She paced the thick carpet restlessly, and suddenly there came to her the sound of footsteps on the stairs.
Jane stopped, every muscle tense. The moment had arrived. She faced the door, tight-lipped. It comforted her a little in this crisis to reflect that Rodney was not one of those massive Ethel M. Dell libertines who might make things unpleasant for an intruder. He was only a welter-weight egg of evil; and, if he tried to start anything, a girl of her physique would have little or no difficulty in knocking the stuffing out of him.
The footsteps reached the door. The handle turned. The door opened. And in strode William Bates, followed by two men in bowler hats.
“Ha!” said William.
Jane’s lips parted, but no sound came from them. She staggered back a pace or two. William, advancing into the centre of the room, folded his arms and gazed at her with burning eyes.
“So,” said William, and the words seemed forced like drops of vitriol from between his clenched teeth, “I find you here, dash it!”
Jane choked convulsively. Years ago, when an innocent child, she had seen a conjuror produce a rabbit out of a top-hat which an instant before had been conclusively proved to be empty. The sudden apparition of William affected her with much the same sensations as she had experienced then.
“How-ow-ow⎯?” she said.
“I beg your pardon?” said William, coldly.
“How-ow-ow⎯?”
“Explain yourself,” said William.
“How-ow-ow did you get here? And who-oo-oo are these men?”
William seemed to become aware for the first time of the presence of his two companions. He moved a hand in a hasty gesture of introduction.
“Mr. Reginald Brown and Mr. Cyril Delancey—my wife,” he said, curtly.
The two men bowed slightly and raised their bowler hats.
“Pleased to meet you,” said one.
“Most awfully charmed,” said the other.
“They are detectives,” said William.
“Detectives!”
“From the Quick Results Agency,” said William. “When I became aware of your clandestine intrigue, I went to the agency and they gave me their two best men.”
“Oh, well,” said Mr. Brown, blushing a little.
“Most frightfully decent of you to put it that way,” said Mr. Delancey.
William regarded Jane sternly.
“I knew you were going to be here at four o’clock,” he said. “I overheard you making the assignation on the telephone.”
“Oh, William!”
“Woman,” said William, “where is your paramour?”
“Really, really,” said Mr. Delancey, deprecatingly.
“Keep it clean,” urged Mr. Brown.
“Your partner in sin, where is he? I am going to take him and tear him into little bits and stuff him down his throat and make him swallow himself.”
“Fair enough,” said Mr. Brown.
“Perfectly in order,” said Mr. Delancey.
Jane uttered a stricken cry.
“William,” she screamed, “I can explain all.”
“All?” said Mr. Delancey.
“All?” said Mr. Brown.
“All,” said Jane.
“All?” said William.
“All,” said Jane.
William sneered bitterly.
“I’ll bet you can’t,” he said.
“I’ll bet I can,” said Jane.
“Well?”
“I came here to save Anastatia.”
“Anastatia?”
“Anastatia.”
“My sister?”
“Your sister.”
“His sister Anastatia,” explained Mr. Brown to Mr. Delancey in an undertone.
“What from?” asked William.
“From Rodney Spelvin. Oh, William, can’t you understand?”
“No, I’m dashed if I can.”
“I, too,” said Mr. Delancey, “must confess myself a little fogged. And you, Reggie?”
“Completely, Cyril,” said Mr. Brown, removing his bowler hat with a puzzled frown, examining the maker’s name, and putting it on again.
“The poor child is infatuated with this man.”
“With the bloke Spelvin?”
“Yes. She is coming here with him at four o’clock.”
“Important,” said Mr. Brown, producing a notebook and making an entry.
“Important, if true,” agreed Mr. Delancey.
“But I heard you making the appointment with the bloke Spelvin over the phone,” said William.
“He thought I was Anastatia. And I came here to save her.”
William was silent and thoughtful for a few moments.
“It all sounds very nice and plausible,” he said, “but there’s just one thing wrong. I’m not a very clever sort of bird, but I can see where your story slips up. If what you say is true, where is Anastatia?”
“Just coming in now,” whispered Jane. “Hist!”
“Hist, Reggie!” whispered Mr. Delancey.
They listened. Yes, the front door had banged, and feet were ascending the staircase.
“Hide!” said Jane, urgently.
“Why?” said William.
“So that you can overhear what they say and jump out and confront them.”
“Sound,” said Mr. Delancey.