“Go home as quickly as you can,” I whispered to the chauffeur. “Give Mr. Estabrook, my guest, this slip of paper. Tell him to lose no time. Tell him to bring the revolver he will find in the top drawer of my desk! Don’t wait for me. I’ll walk.”
The man gazed at me stupidly a moment before he started the machine.
“He believes I am crazy,” I said to myself as I saw him turn the corner. “Whether or not he is right, the interview will be at least interesting.”
You will agree with me that these words forecasted accurately.
CHAPTER II
IN THE PAINTED GARDEN
East India Place is not a well-known thoroughfare. In fact, it is a court, hidden between truck stables and concealed also by the boxes and bales of commission merchants. Even on a sunshiny day the dank bottom of this court is dark and smells as if it were under rather than on the earth. A warehouse occupies one side, the other presents several doorways, which might once have been the entrances to sailors’ lodgings, but which now are plastered with the rude signs of junk dealers. The numbers on these houses were all even—2-4-8-10—which left me the conclusion that Number 5 must be the warehouse and that the scene-painting loft must be on the top floor of the grimy building. Indeed, I could see that a skylight had been superimposed on the roof and my eye caught the sign at the entrance, “The Mohave Scenic Studios.” I began the ascent of boxed wooden stairways, musty with the odors of ships’ cargoes. At the top a sign confronted me, “No Admittance Except on Business. This means You”; but beneath it in red, white, and blue paint, was the message, “Used for Storage. New Studio at 43 Barkiston Avenue.”
I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the stump of a knob; the door yielded. I found myself in a large room with rolls and rolls of canvas in piles and huge scenic back drops pendant from the high ceiling. A skylight above, with rotting curtains drawn across the square panes, threw a strange green glare over everything. A peculiar aromatic odor, such as is sometimes wafted over the footlights into the audience, gave the deserted place a theatrical flavor which was heightened by the presence of gilded papier-maché statuettes and a huge representation of the god Buddha leaning against the bare brick wall. A spider had spun a web above one of this god’s bare shoulders; it glinted in a chance ray of direct sunlight which had entered through a tear in the curtain overhead. Above me a staging held a kitchen chair, some fire pails, and several pots whose sides were smirched with the colors they contained. The only sign of human life was the faint warm odor of pipe smoke. Knowing, then, that some one beside myself was in the loft, I proceeded gingerly between two vast canvases which hung side by side, preparing myself on my soft-footed way down this aisle to see the man I sought as I emerged from the other end. I imagined I heard a nervous, suppressed cough, indicating that the other already knew of my invasion of his strange abode.