“But I don’t know.”
Restow advanced upon him, took him by the shoulder, swung him round.
“You are changed—you are not yourself! What is it? If you suffer, you should be in your nursing home. I will not have a secretary to suffer here under my nose when London is full to the brim of hospitals. Go to your hospital if you suffer!”
“But I don’t.”
“You are only stupid—hein? If there were hospitals where stupidity could be cured, would they not be packed to the roof?” He let go of Lindsay with a push. “Perhaps not! Stupidity is the fashion, after all—the cotton wool which prevents the clever, brittle, dangerous ones from breaking one another into bits. You are not a man, my Fothering—you are packing. You are cotton wool, and you shall pad me all round so that I do not break myself—and others—but I do not care so much about the others. Drayton is one of the clever ones. Some day he will break himself if he does not look about him for some nice safe cotton wool.”
He began to laugh, and Lindsay drew breath again. He had had a bad moment. He breathed deep, and watched Restow laughing, with his eyes gone away into crinkles of fat and the black hair which he wore en brosse quivering all across his scalp.
“Have you seen my house?” he asked suddenly when he had stopped laughing.
Lindsay hoped that it was safe to say, “Not all of it.”
“Drayton did not show it to you?”
“It’s a very large house,” said Lindsay.
Restow began to tell him that it was five houses thrown into one. He took him out through the long passage and into the glazed-in courtyard, which was a swimming-pool with artificial rocks, and palms and tropical plants on either side of an irregular path skirting the water.
“You do not like bathing, and that is a pity.”
Lindsay felt that he simply could not bear to waste that pool.
“Anyone would like bathing in a place like this,” he said.
“But you do not swim.”
Hang it all, Froth could swim—did swim when they were at school together—and it wasn’t the sort of thing you forgot.
“Oh, I swim in a sort of a way,” he said.
They left the courtyard by another door. There was a gymnasium and a Turkish bath, a bowling alley and a covered tennis court. Restow walked him through them, talking rapidly with his queer mixed accent. He had been everywhere in the world and had his head well stored with odd layers of knowledge, one burying the other until some sudden explosion of interest hurled a mixture of battered fragments to the surface.
They emerged at last into the green marble hall and mounted the stair. Immediately opposite the head of it tall double doors of carved and gilded wood led into the ball-room. Restow took him through it. The mirror-lined walls reflected his gesticulations.
They passed by another door into a room that was all gold. Walls, floor, and ceiling were of some gold mosaic which reminded Lindsay of St Mark’s in Venice. Gold curtains veiled the windows; a thick gold brocade moulded the chairs and couches; and, for sole relief, two long runners of deep-piled emerald green crossed the hard polish of the golden floor. It was a dreadful room. The Empress Theodora might have felt at home in it, or the lady whose head the Sultan cut off before he married Scheherzade.
“A nice room—hein?” said Restow. “A beautiful room? A room for a beautiful woman—nicht?” He flung out his arm in an expansive gesture. “Where is she? Where is she? Here is the room—but where is the woman? You ask me, and if I could tell you, I would tell you. But I cannot tell you. There is nothing but a portrait. Prepare now, and you shall see the portrait of the most beautiful woman in the world!”
He advanced with a rush and flung open what Lindsay had taken to be the two gilded halves of an arched door. They fell back, emerald green on the inner side, and disclosed a picture. With a flamboyant wave of the hand Restow stood aside.
Lindsay remained face to face with a vividly handsome woman. A short tunic of emerald gauze left her magnificent arms and legs quite bare. Chains of emeralds dripped from throat and wrists and were twined in the sweeping waves of hair which fell about her to the knee. It was as black as pitch—dull soft masses of it, tossed back to leave one shoulder bare. Above the other, and parting the flowing hair, there peered the head of an enormous snake. The greyish yellow coils crossed the woman’s body twice, and the tail was twined about her feet. Out of the shadows on her right a panther leaned, its head raised to meet her hand. The woman’s eyes looked out across the room, dominating it.
Lindsay stared, and heard Restow’s voice behind him:
“What a woman! Hein?”
Lindsay turned, and saw that he was passing a handkerchief across his brow. The hand that held it shook visibly.
“Ah! What a woman!” said Restow.
Lindsay discerned that he was being given a cue.
“Who is she?” he asked.
“Who is she? The most beautiful woman in the world! That you can see for yourself—nicht? And the bravest, and the cleverest, and”—he drew himself up and thumped his chest—“my wife, I tell you—mine!” He thumped again. “For me—out of all the millions in the world! In India three hundred and fifty millions. In China eight hundred millions. In America a hundred and twenty millions. In Europe, in England—more millions. In Australia, in Japan, in South America—more again. And out of all those millions I alone”—he beat furiously on his breast with a huge clenched fist—“I myself alone have the incredible, the stupendous good fortune to be the husband of Gloria Paravicini!”
Lindsay began to have flashes of memory. Restow had married a—a barefoot girl out of a travelling circus?—a famous lion tamer’s daughter?—a dompteuse of international celebrity? He said,
“I congratulate you.”
Restow drew in his breath with the effect of a sob.
“No—no—no! A thousand times no! For all those millions who have never had her—they can bear it, because they do not know what they have lost. But for me, the one incredibly sought out by fortune, to have and to lose her—what can you say to that?” He waved his hand with the crumpled handkerchief in it. “Do you say ‘I congratulate you?’ Or do you say with some damfool poet, that it is better to love and to lose than never to get anybody to love you at all? I have not got that right—but no matter, it is a damfool thing to say and not worth getting right, so why does it matter?”
Lindsay had not the slightest idea of what to offer in the way of condolence.
“I tell you,” said Restow, once more mopping his brow, “I tell you that to lose a woman like that is something—something!” He rushed at the doors and flung them to. “I cannot look—I have not the courage! I do not come here alone, because I am afraid of what I might do—but sometimes I must look at her, and I must speak, or I shall go mad!”
“If it does you good—”
“Nothing does me good!” said Restow.
“Perhaps time—”
“What is time? I tell you, Fothering, the first time she left me it was for a week, and every minute of that week was like three hundred years. Then she came back. Then again we quarrelled. Brute—beast—insensate fool to quarrel with such a woman! This time it is a month before she returns—and the third time six months—and then a year. And now she has already divorced me for the second time. What do you say to that?”
Lindsay hadn’t anything to say. To suggest that there might be luck in third numbers was beyond his audacity.
“In a word,” said Restow, “I cannot live with her, and I cannot live without her. I am Mahomet’s coffin—and it is a dismal sort of married life that has a coffin for its symbol.” He rammed the handkerchief down into his pocket. “Enough! We will not talk of it any more. Some day, if she continues to divorce me, I shall marry again—a quiet, dull, kind, gentle, docile nonentity.” He marked each adjective by beating with one hand upon th
e palm of the other. “She will have golden hair. She will have blue eyes, big as saucers and blue as skim milk. She will have many children, all docile as little dogs. She will faint if she sees a mouse. And if she displeases me, I shall beat her.” He threw back his head and laughed, showing strong, crowded teeth. “Aha! Aha! To-night I write to Gloria to tell of this plan! Aha, my Fothering! We will see!”
CHAPTER XI
LINDSAY SPENT THE GREATER part of the evening listening whilst Restow declaimed the story of his married life. He had fallen in love at first sight—“With one beat of the heart, with one coup d’oeil. As Shakespeare says, he don’t know the first thing about love—no, by Jing—who didn’t fall in love at first sight—though, as you are about to remark, he didn’t put it just like that. How does he say it—hein?”
Lindsay gave up the unequal struggle. After all, even Froth might be supposed to know a quotation or two.
“‘He never loved who loved not at first sight,’” he murmured.
“That’s the goods!” said Restow. “You have it in one—you hit the bull! No, the bull’s eye—nicht? And that is how Gloria Paravicini hit me—right in the eye—biff!”
He leaned forward in his chair—they had come to rest in a more human apartment where there were real chairs meant to sit on. He leaned forward, a hairy hand on either knee.
“It was a travelling circus, and you are to imagine a flare of kerosene lamps, and a smell of wet canvas, and lamp-oil, and wild beasts, and many people all hot and wet, because outside the rain comes down like thunder that never stops. And in the middle of all this”—his little eyes glowed—“I see Gloria! And how do I see her—hein? Can you tell me that? You cannot. I will tell you. She stands there with her black hair hanging, her beautiful black hair, and that snake—Typhoon, she calls him—a beast straight from Satan, coiled all about her—six coils, for I counted them. It has only to tighten the coils and she is crushed. It lays its head upon her shoulder, and its tongue goes to and fro, flic-flic, like evil lightning, and its eyes are full of wickedness. And on one side of Gloria there is a lion, and on the other there is a lioness, and she makes those beasts stand up on either side and rest their paws against her shoulders. And they are afraid of the snake. I see them turn their heads this way and that, I hear them groan, and growl, and grumble to themselves. And the snake looks at them and moves its tongue, and thinks of all the evil that has ever been done in the world.”
He banged suddenly with one fist on his knee.
“One of the times she left me, it was because the painter of that picture put a panther into it instead of a lion—he said the lion was too large—and Gloria went into one of her magnificent passions and said that it was done between us to humiliate her. Women are extremely various, as the Latin proverb says, and it is a fool who fights them.”
Lindsay got away to his rooms in the end. He was safer than he had thought to be. Restow’s preoccupation with his own affairs made his secretary a mere distant point on the horizon. It would simply never enter Restow’s head to think about him except as a speck, a distant unremarkable speck.
He took off his coat, raised his arms above his head, and stretched. At any rate the first evening was over. He stretched again. This time something crackled. He investigated the crackle, traced it to a waistcoat pocket, and drew out a crumpled bill and a note folded small. The bill was for socks. The note—
He began to unfold it. He had read the words “I must see you,” when in the dressing-mirror before him, he saw the door of the room swing open.
The mirror was before him and the door behind. The swing of the door passed in the mirror like a shadow passing in water. His eyes were on the note, yet he saw the shadow move, and knew what it was. An old trick served him; the note went up his sleeve, and he swung round with the bill in his hand, to see Drayton standing in the doorway, a hand on either jamb, his head stooped forward and his eyes intent. He stood there for a moment, then stepped inside and closed the door.
Lindsay waited for him to speak. He considered that he might without indiscretion appear astonished. He raised his eyebrows and looked a question.
Drayton spoke harshly.
“We were interrupted—and I have things to say to you.”
“Won’t you sit down?” said Lindsay.
Drayton shook his head.
“You must have anticipated that I should have things to say to you.”
Lindsay shrugged his shoulders. It had been a trick of Froth’s.
“What do you want to say?” he asked.
Drayton came a step nearer.
“Don’t you know?”
“Well—I suppose you do.”
What a cold, dull stare the fellow had. The heavy lids gave only a glimpse of it. The half hidden eyes were like the eyes of a lizard—a lizard, or a snake.
Drayton spoke with a sudden forward thrust of the head.
“Have you talked? That is what I have come to ask you. Have you talked—or have you remembered to be very, very careful?”
Lindsay turned away. He was still holding the bill. He laid it down on the dressing-table before he answered.
“Of course I’ve been careful.”
“Careful all the time? Careful with everyone? Very, very careful?” Drayton made a grating guttural of every ‘r’.
“Of course!”
“Look at me!” said Drayton. “Don’t stand turned away, or I shall know that you are lying. Now—answer! Whom did you see whilst you were in that nursing home? Think carefully—very, very carefully.”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
“No nurse—no doctor?”
Lindsay shrugged again.
“Oh, if you count nurses and doctors—”
“I count everyone. Isn’t a doctor a man? And isn’t a nurse a woman, which is ten times worse? Did you talk to these people? Did you tell them anything? What did you tell them?”
Lindsay’s brain worked like lightning. Someone had been making inquiries. Someone knew that he had talked, cried out in his sleep. He had better put an innocent face on it and tell the truth.
“I didn’t tell them anything. I had a nightmare and screamed out—”
Drayton came nearer.
“And what did you say? Be careful, Fothering!”
“I don’t know—I can’t remember. Not anything to matter. The nurse said I screamed out that someone was after me.”
Drayton smiled. It was a horrible thing to see him smile. The lips drew away and showed blackened teeth. The cold, dull stare was fixed on Lindsay’s face.
“Someone—someone? Or was it something?”
A crawling shudder ran down the back of Lindsay’s neck. He had no idea why these words of Drayton’s should make him shudder, but they did. A flash of anger followed.
“What do you want, Drayton?” he said.
Drayton seemed to hang above him for a moment; even with his stoop he was the taller by a head. Then he drew back.
“I want to be satisfied of your—discretion.”
Lindsay jerked a shoulder.
“How can I satisfy you?”
“I shall tell you that. But first—you adhere to the story that you have told nothing?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then why did you meet Elsie Manning?”
“When?” said Lindsay boldly.
“Are you going to deny it? You were followed. Did you think that I should take no precautions? You left this house at two o’clock to go to Rillbourne. You had your luggage with you in the car, and you drove yourself. You thought that was very clever. You stopped the car in Cannington Square and parked it there. Then you met Miss Manning at the corner of Leaham Road. You walked up and down with her, talking all the time. You were with her for half an hour. After that you left her, got into the car, and continued your journey to Rillbourne, which you never
reached. You ran into a lorry on the Great West Road and were taken to hospital. The same evening you were transferred to a private nursing home. You can see that it is no use lying to me. You talked for half an hour to Elsie Manning. I want to know what you said.”
Lindsay allowed himself to snigger. Froth had had a most irritating snigger.
“My good Drayton, what does one say to a girl?”
“What did you say to Miss Manning?”
“Let me see—” said Lindsay. “I must be very careful to be accurate—mustn’t I? I think I said, ‘Hullo!’ but I won’t swear to it. And then—well, I may have said I was pleased to see her, but I won’t swear to that either.”
Drayton’s look became more intense. He said quite slowly,
“Do not talk like a fool! What did you say to Miss
Manning?”
Lindsay looked back at him steadily.
“In the sense that you mean—nothing.”
In a way he was burning his boats. Froth would probably have knuckled down to Drayton—Lindsay didn’t know. All he knew was that, having been accepted as Froth, he must henceforth play the game his own way.
“You mean that?” said Drayton.
“Yes, I mean it,” said Lindsay. “After all, why should I tell her anything?”
Drayton went on looking at him. He had the most unnerving stare. It shifted at last.
“Why indeed?” said Drayton. “As you say. It would be dangerous. To her. Very dangerous. And to you. So dangerous that one might almost say it would be fatal.” He used only half his voice and delivered each short sentence as if it were an isolated remark, then after a pause followed it with another.
“I’ve told her nothing,” said Lindsay with a touch of impatience.
Drayton walked to the door, but turned before he reached it.
“I trust no one,” he said. “Remember that. I want you to realize that. If you talk to the girl—if you give away—if you have given away so much as one whisper about the little, the very little, that you know, she will be removed. You will not hurt us—we have our safeguards. You will sign her death warrant and your own.” He opened the door, moved slowly across the threshold, and turned again. “You will have your orders in a day or two,” he said and shut the door.
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