“But quick!”
“No!”
“But I know this room,” she sobbed. “I have the right.”
“You have what?”
“The right to enter. Mon Dieu! C’est la chambre de mon ami, messieurs!”
Nothing is stranger than truth; nothing more grotesque, more dramatic, more truly unreal. I can imagine how this revelation would have been received on the stage in any of the five continents: the gestures of the outraged husband, the tableau of the horrified perceptor, and the amazement of the guests. But clinging to our precarious footing on the roof, we received it only as a stroke of luck—a means of escape from our awful predicament. We thanked Heaven for Yvette’s lover!
“Up with her!” I hissed at the poet. “Stoop down, man, and I’ll lift her into the room.”
He leaned obediently against the bricks. I grasped the dancer firmly by the sole of her soft dancing buskin and boosted her against the wall, the poet clumsily bent lower still, and she clambered over him to the window sill. Scraping, gasping, struggling, she reached it, slipped her arms over the sill, and rose. There was a flutter of stiff dancing skirt, her twinkling, white-clad legs and feet slipped over the ledge and out of sight. Then came a pause. McTeague and I stared at each other soberly. “Hm!” he breathed deeply. “Hm! Hm!”
Her head, with the Liberty Cap ridiculously awry, peeped over the window ledge. “It’s all right. He isn’t here. I’ll help you in, messieurs,” Yvette said calmly, and in two minutes more we stood beside her in the unlighted bedroom of her ami.