“They’d never have suspected it,” he spoke again to me. “They’d each thought the rest were getting thick in the head and nobody would’ve tried to get up from the table—till they couldn’t.”
He was speaking of the four, who would have been in the Sencort directors’ room, if I hadn’t interfered; and his words, and this sight of the rabbits before me, made me see how the Englishman and the Frenchman and Teverson and Sencort would have gone, without feeling, without knowing, with nothing really to alarm them till too late.
“Great stuff,” said Keeban again and not to me but to the normals. “We’ll make it worth millions yet—millions! We’ll get the next bunch and then sell Wall Street the gas—at our own price! Boys, the curtain raiser’s over.”
For the rabbits had drooped into death. There was not a mark nor a twist on them to show it. Keeban shut off the gas, where he had turned it on; he pulled the cords to open the ceiling.
“Perfectly safe in two minutes,” he assured Doris and me. “It’s light; the stuff rises.”
Doris and I looked at each other. What had been done had been planned of course to break our nerve. I can’t say what cracks showed in mine, nor how much satisfaction I was giving them. I can say that what she was supplying them was mighty small.
We had two minutes, one of us or both of us; and she wasn’t for wasting them. Nor was I thinking of things far away. I couldn’t; and I didn’t want to.
I felt my flashes of home; of my mother and my father. I felt flashes of Jerry, as he used to be when he was my brother. To see him here beside me now stopped these old sensations. My mind brought to me the night he’d come and told me how “Keeban” must have taken away Dorothy Crewe; it brought me to the police station where, that same night, he broke away; it brought me to the Flamingo Feather where I danced with Doris, calling her Cleopatra. It brought me to Caldon’s, where I happened on her “shoving the queer”; it took me to the Blackstone and the train and to that supper with her again. It took me to that closet where I’d kissed her, as I had never kissed any girl before.
Here we were, caught together, with Keeban going once more into the glass room. He went himself and picked up the rabbits and flung them at our feet on the floor.
“How about it now?” he said to me. “What’s the order? The lady first?”