II
A taxi came round the corner. The wheels, spinning over the road, sounded like rain. He turned back.
“Sir!” cried a voice. “Please!”
The taxi had stopped, and a woman was leaning out of the window. Was she calling him? It must be so, for there was no one else in sight.
“Can you please tell me where Mrs. Rice lives?” said the woman.
“Er—no,” said he. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know any one of that name here.[Pg 227]”
He spoke a little stiffly, because he did not like that voice. It was musical enough, but lacking in calm. She was not discouraged, however.
“If you’d just please look at this—card,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve read the name wrong.”
Now Edward was frankly suspicious. He did not want to approach that taxi, but he had not the moral courage to refuse. He would have preferred to be set upon by bandits, to be blackjacked and robbed, rather than show his reluctance. He stepped off the curb and crossed the road. He knew that something was going to happen.
The woman in the taxi handed him a card; and at the same moment she clutched his collar, and, leaning forward, whispered in his ear:
“Say that Mrs. Rice lives in that house! Pretend to read the card! Quick!”
What could he do? He didn’t want to say anything, but he did not know how to refuse this agitated creature. He took the card, went around to the front of the taxi, and pretended to read the card by the fierce white glare of the headlights.
“Oh!” he said. “Mrs. Bice! I see! She lives there—in that house.”
“Thank you!” said the woman in the taxi.
The instinct of self-preservation warned him to be off then, but he had also another instinct—that of helping other people who were in trouble. Something was obviously wrong here, and, prudent or not, he could not turn his back and walk off. The woman had got out, and stood beside him in the road.
“Please pay him and send him away!” she whispered.
So that was the game!
“I’m sorry,” said Edward blandly, “but I’ve come out without a penny in my pockets.”
“Here!” said she, and thrust a purse into his hand. “Only please get rid of him!”
He saw he had been wrong. With a certain compunction, he approached the driver.
“Five dollars!” said the man.
Edward leaned over and looked at the meter.
“Two forty,” he said.
“She made a special rate with me—” the driver began.
“Two forty,” said Edward briefly.
He opened the little purse, and found it crammed with bills—large bills, some of them—an extraordinary amount of cash. He was searching for change when the driver commenced.
Now Edward, as assistant credit manager, was not unaccustomed to remonstrances from persons who could not get what they wanted; nor was his nature a submissive or timid one. He felt quite able to withstand the driver’s attack; but women are not like that. Bluster impresses them, and this woman was impressed.
“Oh, please!” she cried. “Give him the five dollars! Give him anything! Only do get rid of him!”
After all, it was her money. Edward gave the driver a five-dollar bill, with a low and forcible remark. The engine started up, and off went the taxi. It seemed extraordinarily quiet after it had gone.
“Drunk,” observed Edward.
“I know!” said the woman. “He was perfectly awful!”
She was going to cry, if she had not already begun; and he wanted no more of that.
“Now, then!” he said, in a loud, cheerful voice. “Shall I get you another taxi?”
“Please!” said she.
She was crying now—no doubt about it. What was worse, she took his arm and clung to it.
“If you’ll wait here for a few minutes—” suggested Edward.
“Oh, I can’t!” she cried. “Oh, please don’t go away and leave me all alone!”
He saw himself that it wouldn’t do to leave her standing here in the street while he walked half a mile to the station for a taxi.
“I’ll go into the Baxters’ and telephone for one,” he thought.
But Mrs. Baxter was a particular friend of Mildred’s. She would bother him. She would ask questions. She would want to know what he was doing, wandering about at ten o’clock at night. She would suspect that there had been a quarrel.
The idea was intolerable. He would not go to the Baxters’; and, not having been long in the neighborhood, he knew no one else.
As he stood deliberating, the lights in the house behind them went out, leaving the world very dark. For the moment, he felt a thousand miles from home. He felt[Pg 228] marooned, cut off. He couldn’t believe that just around the corner was that six-room house of hollow tile, with all improvements—that house which was mystically more than a house because it was his home. He owned it. In his experience as assistant credit manager he had seen what fatal accidents could happen to defer deferred payments, and he would have none of them. His rule was to pay cash. Mildred had more than once protested against this rule, but in vain.
“You’re always looking ahead and imagining that all sorts of queer, awful things are going to happen,” she had said, only the day before; “but they never do!”
They didn’t, didn’t they? A lot she knew!
“Where can I get a taxi?” asked the voice at his side, and he came out of his reverie with a start.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to walk to the station,” he said; “unless you happen to pick one up on the way.”
“Oh, dear!” said she. “Is it far? Half a mile? But if I’ve got to walk that far—isn’t there some sort of hotel in the town?”
“Yes—there’s the American House,” Edward told her.
“Then I’ll go there,” said she. “If you’ll just please tell me the way—”
He knew that he must go with her—that she was one of those women who can never go anywhere or do anything alone. Impossible to explain how he knew this, or how, in the dark, and without having even once looked squarely at her, he knew that she was young, pretty, and charmingly dressed. Stifling a sigh, he set off at her side. It had to be.
She thanked him very nicely. He assured her that it was no trouble at all, and then they both fell silent. She sounded as if she were walking quickly, her little high heels clacking smartly on the pavement; but as a matter of fact their progress was slow—a snail’s pace, Edward thought. At this rate, he wouldn’t get back to the house for an hour—that is, if he ever did go back. He said to himself that he had not made up his mind what he would do; but in his heart he knew that he couldn’t help himself. He was a victim of destiny.
“But it is awfully nice of you!” said the fair unknown. “Were you just out taking a walk?”
“I wasn’t going anywhere,” Edward replied gloomily.
“That’s like me,” said she. “I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care where I go, or what becomes of me!”
This alarmed Edward. After having been married to Mildred for nearly six months, he knew that such people were possible. They really didn’t care where they went or what they did. They were incalculably dangerous and reckless.
“All women,” he thought somberly, “are alike—all of them!”
Perhaps at this moment Mildred was not caring where she went or what became of her.
“I know you must wonder,” the fair unknown continued. “I don’t suppose any one in the world could understand.”
She paused, but Edward gave her no encouragement.
“I really did know a Mrs. Rice who lived somewhere in this neighborhood when I was a little girl,” she resumed. “Such a dear old lady. And somehow, in my desperation, I thought of h-her.” She was wiping her eyes with a small handkerchief. “You must think I’m so weak and s-silly!”
“Oh, no!” said Edward politely.
A fatalistic gloom enveloped him. He felt no curiosity at all. He knew not where he was going, or why; and what chiefly occupied his mind was a profound longing for a smoke and a hat. With a cigar, he felt, he could have regained his philosophic outlook. With a hat, he could have faced this situation more like a man of the world. He had neither, and he was walking off into the night, away from home.
The lights of the town made him anxious that the lady should dry her tears.
“I think it’s going to rain,” he observed in an easy, conversational tone. “Country needs rain badly.”
He might have known that it wouldn’t work. She paid no attention whatever to this remark.
“I only want to hide,” she said. “If I could have found dear old Mrs. Rice! That driver—he was so awful! He was going to drive out into the country and murder me. I saw it in his face. And then you came!”
“I happened to be there,” Edward corrected her.
“Isn’t it strange, the way things happen?” she said in a low, intense voice. “Doesn’t it seem like fate?”
It did. Edward said nothing. He was trying to invent some excuse for getting his[Pg 229] arm away from her before they passed any shops where he was known. He failed to do so, however. The lights in all the shops on the main street shone upon him, hatless, with the desperate lady clinging to him.
The portico of the American House was in sight now. They drew nearer and nearer. Ten steps more—
“Quick!” she whispered. She pulled violently at his arm, and in an instant he found himself inside a jeweler’s shop. “He was there—outside the hotel!” she whispered. “If he’d turned his head! He’d surely have killed you! Isn’t that a sweet bracelet?”
This last remark was for the benefit of the young man who had come behind the counter. He seemed pleased, and brought out the bracelet in a velvet box.
“Sweet, isn’t it?” she murmured.
She nudged Edward hard. He glanced at her, and a thrill of terror ran through him. She was smiling archly at him. Her tears had in no way marred a most lovely and piquant face. She was a beautiful and elegant woman, such as Edward had frequently seen in his office. He knew these pampered beings, and their naïve and exorbitant demands.
“Yes,” he replied faintly.
“Get it for me, dear!” she said.
He was stupefied.
“I want it! Get it for me, dear!” she repeated, with the same arch smile; but her elbow dug sharply into his ribs.
“How much?” he asked in a hollow voice.
“Only twenty-five dollars,” she said brightly.
He turned aside, and from her well filled purse took out the requisite amount. The young clerk wrapped up the bracelet and handed it to her. As he did so, she leaned across the counter.
“Is there a back way to get out?” she asked in a low and confidential voice. “They’re out there, looking for us, and we want to give them the slip.”
“Certainly, madam,” said the clerk. “This way!”
He opened a door at the rear of the shop. They followed him along a dark passage, across a yard, through a gate in the fence, and out into another street.
“Er—good night!” said the clerk.
“No!” returned Edward. “Look here!”
But the fair unknown, still clinging to his arm, positively dragged him on.
“Stupid!” she hissed. “Hurry up! Do you want to be killed?”
They turned the corner into a dark alley, and here Edward stopped.
“Look here!” he said sternly. “This can’t go on! I—”
“Don’t you see? He thought we were a bride and groom, trying to get away.”
Edward believed none of this. He did not believe that he was in any danger of being killed by any person whatsoever, or that the clerk had thought what the unknown imagined; but women, as he had noticed before, always believed what they wished to believe.
“I have to live in this town, you know,” he observed.
Of course this observation did not move her. Women never considered the future. They lived, reckless and heedless, in the present moment.
“Where do you want to go now?” he pursued. “It’s getting late.”
“Leave me!” said she. “It doesn’t matter. Thank you for all you’ve done. Go away and leave me!”
“I can’t leave you here—in an alley,” said Edward, repressing a violent irritation.
“What does it matter?” said she. “I don’t care what becomes of me!”
“Well, I do!” said Edward.
“Oh, how sweet of you!” she cried, and began to weep again.
“I mean,” Edward explained hastily, “that I couldn’t leave any woman alone in a place like this.”
“You’re so ch-chivalrous!” she sobbed. “I knew it the moment I heard your voice!”
“I am not chivalrous,” replied Edward firmly; “only—look here! I’ll get a taxi and see you home.”
“I have no home!” she wailed.
“You must live somewhere.”
“I don’t—not any more. Oh, leave me! Leave me! I don’t care!” She clutched his arm again, in that frenzied manner which so startled and annoyed him. “Oh, my hat!” she cried. “It’s raining!”
She was right—the first heavy drops were beginning to fall.
“Oh, my pretty little hat!” she cried.
Now, Edward’s was a just and logical mind, and yet even he had sometimes been illogically moved by trifles. This infantile plaint about a pretty little hat reminded him of certain things Mildred had said, and aroused in him a pity which the strange[Pg 230]r’s tragic and mysterious sorrows had hitherto failed to inspire.
“Come on!” he said.