“I see him.”
Saratoff crouched beside his friend. They were looking up towards the villa, and against its whiteness cherries and peach trees made a smother of white and cerise. The villa had a pillared loggia partly in sunlight and partly in shadow, and hung with creepers. There were palms and orange trees in the garden, and beds of many coloured anemone, violets and crimson stock; and between two of the white pillars of the loggia a man reclined in a long, cane chair. He was dressed in a suit of white drill, with a big black tie. He had just finished his morning coffee and rolls, and was lighting a cigar.
“By the blood of our martyrs,” said the little man, “he takes his ease.”
Somewhere in the white villa a woman began to sing. Her voice went up into the sunlight—a sensuous and happy voice. They saw her come to an upper window and lean out; she was combing a mass of honey-coloured hair, and she laughed down at the man in the chair. And he, sitting up and blowing smoke, enjoyed the desirableness of her, and spoke to her softly with a voice that was suave and tender.
Gorouki gripped Saratoff’s arm.
“My God! The beast! He is happy. He has slunk away with the plunder. And our women lie tumbled together in a filthy hole in the ground.”
“He is ours,” said Saratoff softly.
They lay there in the grass like a couple of fierce beasts, watching this other beast and his mate, and yet there was a rightness, an ethical inevitableness in their ferocity. Their thoughts went back to Russia—where this man who sat in a chair and sunned himself had perpetrated unthinkable things. Red-handed, suavely cruel, and loving cruelty for its own sake, he had robbed and butchered. Then, like the sly, suave, cunning creature that he was he had gathered up his plunder and disappeared. The black leopard had become the sleek black cat, a cosmopolitan animal, hiding itself in new countries, with the blood washed from its paws.
They talked in whispers.
“The Villa Felix! He feels himself safe. All his loot turned into foreign bonds.”
“A respectable householder!”
“Wealthy and happy.”
“He can travel like a rich merchant, and drink his wine and ogle the women, and own a villa in the sun. What do you think about it, little one?”
Gorouki made that noise in his throat.
“My wife and two children were kicked into a frozen hole in the ground. Why did we not die—then, my friend? Was it fate—hope, faith in the day that would come?”
He rested his chin on his crossed wrists.
“Yes, you were right—not to hurry. It is good to have seen him here, thinking himself so safe. How ironical! And—I wish him to die slowly——”
“Not one plunge of the knife, little one.”
“No, no. Slowly. And I shall feel like a priest of justice. It will be a solemn moment, my friend, so very solemn. And afterwards—my heart will sing like the heart of a bird.”
When the warm dusk descended upon the garden of the Villa Felix two figures crawled towards the white loggia. A table had been laid for dinner, and Saratoff and Gorouki lay curled up in one of the flower-beds, watching. Two Arab servants served the dinner, and Muller and his mate sat under a softly-shaded lamp, and laughed and talked and clinked glasses. When the meal was over, and the coffee had been served, Muller smoked, while the woman sat on his knees. He blew smoke at her, and she ruffled his oiled hair with her hands.
“Go and make music,” he said.
Her figure flickered through the doorway of the room opening upon the loggia. There was the ripple of a piano; she began to sing, and while she sang two crouching figures with naked feet slipped into the further end of the loggia.
The woman sang:
“L’amour—c’est la vie.”
Muller lay relaxed—purring.
And then two hands came from behind him and closed upon his throat, and a folded cap was pressed over his mouth.
The woman’s voice floated out into the night:
“Love is life——”
Presently she ceased her singing, and sat with her hands resting upon the keyboard, and smiling.
“Chéri,” she called, “what next?”
No one answered her, and with a little amused jerk of the shoulders, she rose and went out into the loggia.
“Méchant,” she laughed; “when I sing—you sleep.”
But Petrovsky—alias Ginkelstein—was sleeping the last, sleep—with a look of terror in his widely-open eyes.
THE OTHER WOMAN
They met in Switzerland. It was on the rink at Caux; but not as most people meet for the first time, decorously, casually, but with sudden, breathless impact.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
He had to grip her by the arms and hold her up. She was a beginner, and somehow she had come slithering into him while he was in the midst of weaving some complicated pattern.
“I’m so sorry. I’m only learning.”
“That’s all right.”
He was aware of her as a breathless, glowing thing with copper-coloured hair tucked under a grass-green knitted cap. Her jumper was of the same vivid greenness. And for a moment her eyes looked into his grey eyes with the pupils of a bigness that made the eyes look black.
“All right—now?”
“Yes.”
His smile was no more than a slight relaxing of his very grave face. He removed his hands, and let her stand unsupported.
“That was a near thing. My fault.”
“No; mine. I saw you, and somehow I simply couldn’t stop. That paralysed feeling.”
“You’ll soon get over it.”
“I hope so.”
She laughed. She was not wearing breeches, but a white skirt, and he was glad of the skirt, but without realizing that such a prejudice might have possibilities. She glowed. She had the red, winter sun behind her, and the ice spread a blueness over its white powdering. And he became aware of a sudden sense of being up among the pine woods and the mountains in a world of light and of youth.
He said:
“I think I have seen you dancing.”
She stood off and looked at him attentively rather like a grave and sensitive child.
“I expect you have.”
“You’ll skate well—pretty soon. They go together.”
“Thank you. Really, you put that rather nicely.”
So it began.
Richard Service had snatched ten days from a London that froze and thawed and drizzled. He belonged to the firm of Blair, Goss & Service, solicitors, of Carfax Street, Mayfair. He had a house at Lelham; but he had let it furnished since the death of his wife two years ago, and had occupied a small service-flat in Blandford Terrace. He was thirty-seven and childless. There were times when he loathed London with a very great loathing.
Joyce Muirhead lived with an aunt at No. 203 Pelham Crescent. She was twenty-four and an orphan. She had some two hundred a year of her own, and a passion for Alsatian puppies, the plays of John Galsworthy, and the music of Ravel and Debussy. Being sufficiently sanguine to have passions for things other than motor-cars and tennis stars, she was not too modern.
Service puzzled her; he seemed to be unusual, and to be unusual is to attract that which is worth attracting. Joyce saw him as a tall, thin, darkish man, with one of those grave, shut-up faces that suggest a window with the blind drawn down. He held aloof. A beautiful skater, he kept to himself, and appeared content to weave patterns of his own, and to be absorbed in his own smooth glidings. Aloof he might be, but not superciliously so. She had never seen him dance. He had a chair in the smoking-room and a book. Sometimes she would see him standing for a few minutes in the doorway of the hotel ball-room, watching.
She thought him sad and rather lonely, interestingly lonely.
Her aunt—Mrs. Lomax—stout and solid, who stodged about in Bedford cord breeches, trailing a luge, and who fell down a great deal, and played bridge every night from half-past eight to eleven-thirty, remained unaware of Richard Service. He played his games
by himself; he was not a card man; you never met him in the American bar.
Mrs. Lomax liked her cocktails.
She always referred to herself as a very observant person, which meant that she had eyes for the pips on a card, and the loose thread on a jumper, and for little else. For quite a week she failed to observe that her niece and Service were beginning to play a game together. Someone said to her:
“It looks like a case.”
Mrs. Lomax, debating the question whether she should go three no trumps, betrayed another obsession.
“Not ’flu, I hope?”
She had a horror of ’flu and of being ill in hotels. It was so expensive, and it interfered with your bridge.
“No; your niece.”
Mrs. Lomax’s very blue eyes stared.
“Joyce? There’s nothing the matter with Joyce. There never is. Three no trumps, partner.”
The other lady smiled at a smoke ring.
“Yes; your niece looks a very healthy young woman. Quite—normal, I should say.”
So normal that she had persuaded Service to dance, though the persuasion was like the music of the Immortal Hour. His dancing, unlike his skates, was a little rusty, but that was of no great consequence, for the rustiness soon wore away. Joyce had the frankness of modernity, even though her temperament matched the colour of her hair.
“I’d give anything to be able to waltz on skates.”
He offered to try and teach her. And then he remembered that he had only four more days, and that Joyce’s enthusiasm was still none too steady on the outside edge, and he debated with himself, and then sent off a wire to Blair.
“Staying another week.”
Old Blair grumbled. These junior partners were not what junior partners had been forty years ago. Too much this, and too much that, and too damned independent. But Service had his week. Who was to deny it to him when skates rang on the Swiss ice?
Joyce’s explorings of the waltz on ice were enthusiastic and always on the edge of a catastrophe.
“Oh, Mr. Service, I am a fool.”
There were occasions when she clutched him, and he had to hold her up, and they laughed in each other’s faces. Such intimacies were obviously good or bad for both of them, and in a little while her cry became:
“Oh, Dick, I am a poisonous idiot.”
She was supremely good-tempered, and her good temper mattered to Richard Service. He did not tell her so. He was thirty-seven, and he had lived in one particular sort of human hell, and when the flare of Joyce’s head seemed to lure him over the edge of himself, he still hung back and hesitated. She was adorable; but just how adorable was she? He was afraid of being scorched, because he knew that he could care rather terribly.
He asked for a sign from heaven, and it was given him—and by a waiter carrying a plate of soup. Mrs. Lomax and her niece sat at a table in the middle of the dining-room; Service had a table by the wall, but it gave him a view of Joyce’s back, and her aunt’s very neat head so permanently waved.
Someone jostled the waiter, and half a plate of soup descended upon Joyce’s back. The soup was hot; also she was wearing her particular frock, a green crêpe de Chine.
Service’s impulse was to grab his table-napkin and make a rush; but, being English, he remained in his chair and did not add to the scene. For there was a scene. Mrs. Lomax made it. She called the waiter a bête cochon, and the man looked tempted to throw the rest of the soup at her.
He was insolent, and Mrs. Lomax stood up on her solid feet, and called for the head-waiter and the manager. But Service was not interested in this rather unseemly pother; he was interested only in Joyce’s face. She was standing. She was looking poignantly at her aunt.
“Oh, don’t, auntie. It doesn’t matter.”
She smiled at the frightened and insulted waiter.
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault.”
She went down the room towards the door. She was going to change her frock. The incident had hurt her, but it had not made her angry.
Service watched her go, and his eyes had a softness. Presently he would be saying to her:
“You were awfully decent to that waiter.”
He did say it; and next day, trailing a desultory luge up in the pine woods, he said other things.
He asked her to marry him, but not before he had told her that she would be his second wife.
She looked very grave over it. Marriage—or the prospect of marriage—is not much the mode these days, but Joyce had not contemplated a perpetual and armed neutrality. With certain temperaments some sort of sex compact is inevitable, and Joyce had always had marriage at the end of her vista, but she had not thought of herself as becoming a second edition, an encore. It was to have been very much her marriage, not a stepping into another woman’s shoes. Even in these divorceful days some women remain fastidious.
She said:
“I don’t know, Dick. It’s so serious.”
Besides, he was thirteen years older than she was.
“I don’t want to rush you, Joyce, but I do care, and pretty badly. But I don’t care—just for myself.”
She let him hold her hand.
“It’s not quite the same, Dick, as if——I want to be honest.”
“I know. But a man learns, unless he is a beast or a fool.”
“You do want me?”
“Not unless——One gets out of the way of being greedy. But you are rather unique. I’m not much good at the casual lingo of the day.”
She said:
“I shouldn’t like you to be. I think we’re more in earnest. But life’s such a pose.”
“That’s just what you are not.”
“Oh, my dear, when one’s awfully in earnest one can be afraid.”
“You need not be afraid of me.”
She wasn’t. But somehow she was a little afraid of the shadow and of the lingering perfume of that other woman.
“Dick, if I marry you, promise——”
“Well?”
“You won’t think of me as a second edition, and always be quoting the first.”
“I promise.”
* * *
They were to be married in April. Service’s tenants vacated the house at Lelham at the end of March, so that matters promised to accommodate themselves to the occasion. Service was giving up the flat in Carfax Terrace, for Joyce asked for the country after five years in Pelham Crescent with Mrs. Lomax. She wanted to garden, to keep two dogs, and have a punt on the river.
Service, feeling absurdly young and happy and with a sense of life renewed, arranged to have a large part of Weir House redecorated while he and Joyce were away on their honeymoon. They had decided to go to Switzerland to see the Spring flowers. Service bought a two-seater car. Old Blair grumbled. He supposed that Service would be demanding another holiday in August or September, but Service muzzled him.
“No; I think we shall be quite happy down there. We want to get the garden in order.”
Early in April, before the decorators did their damndest, Service drove Joyce down to Lelham in the new car. Her young dignity allowed itself a brightness of the eyes. She would have her enthusiasms without dawdling and languor. She was April, but she did not loiter on the first tee, purposely keeping mere man waiting, and drawling out her little cynicisms. She was going to see her house; being a healthy young woman and very well loved, she was beginning to forget that the house had possessed a previous woman.
Service was nervous. At thirty-seven so final an adventure is more serious than at twenty-five.
“Anything you would like altering, you know. I want you to choose the colours.”
She gave him a quizzical, happy look.
“Oh, we’ll compromise about the colours—if necessary. Who’s going to do the giving in, Dick?”
“Is it necessary?”
“Someone always does.”
“Supposing we take turns at it—halve the choices?”
“Always?”
“Yes;
always.”
She was not aware of his nervousness; his habit of reserve helped him; also he was so much hers. He drove the car through Lelham and down Abbey Lane towards the river. They came to the subdued length of an old red brick wall, with fruit trees and the top of a yew hedge showing above it.
“Our wall.”
“Is it? How lovely. I’ve always wanted a garden with an old red wall.”
Iron gates, hung on red brick pillars, opened upon a paved walk. The house itself, not too large, and beautifully balanced, Queen Anne at its best, stood back at the end of a formal garden with panels of grass, and clipped yews, and lavender hedges and stone paths. Window-sashes and frames, door, and the woodwork of the leaded hood were all painted white.
Service watched his future wife’s face as she got out of the car, and stood between the two gate pillars and gazed. He had a moment of suspense. Some of these young things were so “new arty.”
“Dick, it’s perfect!”
“Like it?”
“Love it! It looks as though it smelt of lavender.”
He was intensely relieved. He slipped a hand under her arm.
“It’s quite a gem in its way. At least, I think so. And the garden goes down to the river. Shall we go inside first?”
“Yes, let’s.”
The interior was gently dark, but not too dark. The hall was panelled and painted a soft green; dining-room and drawing-room were also panelled, but their colour was a flat white. Most of the furniture was Georgian, carefully collected by Service in other days. There were bright rugs and carpets, brass, and old pictures. They went from room to room. They stood at windows and looked out into the garden. Daffodils were in flower. Somewhere a blackbird was singing.
They stood close.
“Like it, Joyce?”
Her face was smooth and tranquil.
“It’s the sort of house I have dreamed of.”
Gently he kissed the little half-moon of hair that protruded from under her green hat.
“Well, it’s yours. Alter anything. I want you to feel it is yours.”
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 47