I saw Manana downstairs to the door. It was raining the deuce, and the difference between twilight and night was about the same as that between a man of colour and a nigger. Manana and I stood close together in the open doorway. It was good-bye. I said: “Perhaps they will let you off. I will do my best. Come to me for help later on. Good-bye, Manana. Thank you.”
She smiled. The first and last smile I ever saw light that face. “I must never see you again,” she said, and then the laughter of Julian Raphael tore the smile from her face.
My rooms, as you know, are in Curzon Street: at the rather grubby end where Curzon Street, as though finally realising that it is deprived of the residential support of the noble family of that name, slopes helplessly down to a slit in a grey wall called Lansdowne Passage. I don’t know if you ever have occasion to go through there. When it is dark in London it is darker in Lansdowne Passage. It leads, between Lansdowne House and the wreck of Devonshire House, to Berkeley Street. There is a vertical iron bar up the middle of each opening, which I’m told were originally put there to prevent highwaymen making a dash through the Passage to the open country round Knightsbridge. Against that vertical iron bar leant Julian Raphael. I remember he had a pink shirt on. Our young dandy always showed a stretch of cuff. Between us and him there was one of those very tall silver-grey lamp-posts. You could see him round the edge of it, a black lean lounging shape. And that pink shirt.
“Manana, I followed you!” he cried. And he laughed.
The girl whispered frantically to me: “Get in, get in, get in!”
I said “What?” like a fool. She tried to push me inside the doorway. I was looking at her, not at Julian Raphael. I didn’t understand. There was a scream from the twilight: “Mind out, Manana!” Manana jumped in front of me. That’s all.
I held her as she fell backward. She just sighed.
“Manana!” the voice screamed again. Oh, in terror! The knife was up to the hilt in her throat.
I think I lost my head completely for the first time in my life. I made a dash towards the figure in the opening of Lansdowne Passage. He didn’t move, didn’t even see me coming. He was sobbing like a baby. Then I changed my mind and rushed back to Manana. Lay a flower on a pavement in the rain, and you have Manana as I last saw her. Her eyelids fluttered once or twice. The rain was washing the blood from her throat into the gutter. My man had come down and was doing his best. I looked through the twilight at the crumpled black figure against the iron bar.
“She’s dead, Raphael!” I called, whispering to my man: “Go get him!”