THE OPEN DOOR
"Shall I call the car, sir?" asked the solicitous-eyed Benson, covertly
watching me as I made ready for the street.
"No," was my studiously detached retort, "I intend to walk."
"Latreille was asking, sir, if you would care to have the car laid up."
The significance of that bland suggestion did not escape me. And it
did not add to my serenity of mind.
"Just what business is that of Latreille's?" I demanded, with a prickle
of irritation. My patient-eyed old butler averted his glance, with a
sigh which he didn't seem quite able to control.
"And at the end of the month," I went on, "I intend to discharge that
man, I'm tired of his insolences."
"Yes, sir," Benson softly yet fervently agreed.
My nerves were on edge, I knew, but I wasn't looking for sympathy from
my hired help. And when I swung the door shut behind me I am afraid it
was a movement far from noiseless.
I was glad to get out into the open, glad to get away from old Benson's
commiserative eyes, and have space about me, and cool air to breathe,
and uncounted miles of pavement to weary my legs on.
I noticed, as I turned, into Fifth Avenue, that the moving finger of
light on the Metropolitan clock-dial pointed to an hour past midnight.
So I veered about that delta of idleness, where the noontide turbulence
of Broadway empties its driftwood into the quietness of the square, and
pursued my way up the avenue.
No one can claim to know New York who does not know its avenues in
those mystical small hours that fall between the revolving
street-sweeper and the robin-call of the first morning paper. Fifth
Avenue, above all her sisters, then lies as though tranquillized by
Death, as calm as the Coliseum under its Italian moonlight. She seems,
under the stars, both medievalized and spiritualized. She speaks then
in an intimate whisper foreign to her by day, veiling her earthlier
loquacity in a dreaming wonder, softening and sweetening like a woman
awaiting her lover. The great steel shafts enclosed in their white
marble become turrets crowned with mystery. And the street-floor
itself, as clean and polished as a ballroom, seems to undulate off into
outer kingdoms of romance. An occasional lonely motor-car, dipping up
its gentle slopes like a ship treading a narrow sea-lane buoyed with
pearls as huge as pumpkins, only accentuates the midnight solitude.
So up this dustless and odorless and transmuted avenue I wandered, as
passively as a policeman on his beat, asking of the quietness when and
how I might capture that crown of weariness known as sleep.
I wandered on, mocked at by a thousand drawn blinds, taunted by a
thousand somnolently closed doors. I felt, in that city of rest, as
homeless as a prairie wolf. The very smugness of those veiled and
self-satisfied house-fronts began to get on my nerves. The very
taciturnity of the great silent hostelries irritated me; everything
about them seemed so eloquent of an interregnum of rest, of relaxed
tension, of invisible reservoirs of life being softly and secretly
filled.
Yet as I came to the open width of the Plaza, and saw the wooded gloom
of Central Park before me, I experienced an even stronger feeling of
disquiet. There seemed something repugnant in its autumnal solitudes.
That vague _agoraphobia_ peculiar to the neurasthenic made me long for
the contiguity of my own kind, however unconscious of me and my
wandering they might remain. I found myself, almost without thought,
veering off eastward into one of the city's side-streets.
Yet along this lateral valley of quietness I wandered as disconsolately
as before. What impressed me now was the monotony of the house-fronts
which shouldered together, block by block. Each front seemed of the
same Indiana limestone, of the same dull gray, as though, indeed, the
whole district were a quarry checker-boarded by eroding cross-currents
out of the self-same rock. Each tier of windows seemed backed by the
same blinds, each street-step barricaded by the same door. I stopped
and looked up, wondering if behind those neutral-tinted walls and
blinds were lives as bald and monotonous as the materials that screened
them. I wondered if an environment so without distinction would not
actually evolve a type equally destitute of individuality.
I turned where I stood, and was about to pass diffidently on, when one
of the most unexpected things that can come to a man at midnight
happened to me.
Out of a clear sky, without a note or movement of warning, there
suddenly fell at my feet a heavy bundle.
Where it came from I had no means of telling. The house above me was
as silent and dark as a tomb. The street was as empty as a church.
Had the thing been a meteor out of a star-lit sky, or a wildcat leaping
from a tree-branch, it could not have startled me more.
I stood looking at it, in wonder, as it lay beside the very
area-railing on which my hand had rested. Then I stepped back and
leaned in over this railing, more clearly to inspect the mystery.
Whatever it was, it had fallen with amazingly little noise. There was
no open window to explain its source. There had been no wind to blow
it from an upper-story sill. There was no movement to show that its
loss had been a thing of ponderable import. Yet there it lay, a
mystery which only the deep hours of the night, when the more solemnly
imaginative faculties come into play, could keep from being ridiculous.
I stood there for several minutes blinking down at it, as though it
were a furred beast skulking in a corner. Then I essayed a movement
which, if not above the commonplace, was equally related to common
sense. I stepped in through the railing and picked up the parcel. I
turned it over several times. Then I sat down on the stone steps and
deliberately untied the heavy cord that baled it together.
I now saw why I had thought of that falling bundle as an animal's leap.
It was completely wrapped in what I took to be a Russian-squirrel
motor-coat. The tightly tied fur had padded the parcel's fall.
Enclosed in that silk-lined garment I found a smaller bundle, swathed
about with several lengths of what seemed to be Irish point lace.
Inside this again were other fragments of lacework. Through these I
thrust my exploring fingers with all the alert curiosity of a child
investigating a Christmas-tree cornucopia.
There, in the heart of the parcel, I found a collection which rather
startled me. The first thing I examined was a chamois bag filled with
women's rings, a dozen or more of them, of all kinds. I next drew out
a Florentine _repousse_ hand-bag set with turquoises and seed-pearls,
and then a moonstone necklace, plainly of antique Roman workmanship.
Next came a black and white Egyptian scarab, and then, of all things, a
snuff-box. It was oval and of gold, enameled _en plein_ with a
pastoral scene swarming with plump pink Cupids. Even in that uncertain
light it required no second glance to assure me that I was looking down
at a rare and beautiful specimen of Louis XV jeweler's art. Then came
a small photograph in an oval gold frame. The remainder of the strange
collection was made up of odds and ends of jewelry and a
leather-covered traveling-clock stamped with gilt initials.
I did not take the time to look more closely over this odd assortment
of valuables, for it now seemed clear that I had stumbled on something
as disturbing as it was unexpected. The only explanation of an
otherwise inexplicable situation was that a house-breaker was busily
operating somewhere behind the gray-stone wall which I faced.
The house behind that wall seemed to take on no new color at this
discovery. Its inherent sobriety, its very rectangularity of outline,
appeared a contradiction of any claim that it might be harboring a
figure either picturesque or picaresque. It was no old mansion stained
with time, dark with memories and tears. It carried no atmosphere of
romance, no suggestion of old and great adventures, of stately ways and
noble idlers, of intrigues and unremembered loves and hates, of silence
and gloom touched with the deeper eloquence of unrecorded history. It
was nothing more than a new and narrow and extremely modern house, in
the very heart of a modern New York, simple in line and as obvious in
architecture as the warehouses along an old-world water-front, as bare
of heart as it was bald of face, a symbol of shrill materialities, of
the day of utility. It could no more have been a harbor for romance, I
told myself, than the stone curb in front of it could be translated
into a mountain-precipice threaded with brigand-paths.
Yet I went slowly up those unwelcoming stone steps with the bundle
under my arm. The thief at work inside the house, I assumed, had
simply tied the heavier part of his loot together and dropped it from a
quietly opened window, to be gathered as quickly up, once he had
effected his escape to the street. The sudden afterthought that it
might have been dropped for a confederate caused me to look carefully
eastward and then as carefully westward. But not a sign of life met my
gaze. My figure standing puzzled before that unknown door was the only
figure in the street.
Heaven only knows what prompted me to reach out and try that door. It
was, I suppose, little more than the habit of a lifetime, the almost
unconscious habit of turning a knob when one finds oneself confronted
by a door that is closed. The thing that sent a little thrill of
excitement through my body was that the knob turned in my hand, that
the door itself stood unlocked.
I stooped down and examined this lock as best I could in the uncertain
light. I even ran a caressing finger along the edge of the door.
There was no evidence that it had been jimmied open, just as there was
nothing to show that the lock itself did not stand intact and
uninjured. A second test of the knob, however, showed me that the door
was unmistakably open.
My obvious course, at such a time, would have been to wait for a
patrolman or to slip quietly away and send word in to police
headquarters. But, as I have already said, no man is wholly sane after
midnight. Subliminal faculties, ancestral perversions, dormant and
wayward tendencies, all come to the surface, emerging like rats about a
sleeping mansion. And crowning these, again, was my own neurasthenic
craving for activity, my hunger for the narcotizing influence of
excitement.
And it has its zest of novelty, this stepping into an unknown and
unlighted house at three o'clock in the morning. That novelty takes on
a razor-edge when you have fairly good evidence that some one who has
no business there has already preceded you into that house.
So as I stepped inside and quietly closed the door after me, I moved
forward with the utmost care. Some precautionary sixth sense told me
the place was not unoccupied. Yet the darkness that surrounded me was
absolute. Not a sound or movement came to my ears as I stood there
listening, minute after minute. So I crept deeper into the gloom.
My knowledge of that stereotyped class of residence provided me with a
very fair idea of where the stairway ought to stand. Yet it took much
prodding and groping and pawing about before I came to it. One flicker
of a match, I knew, would have revealed the whole thing to me. But to
strike a light, under the circumstances, would be both foolish and
dangerous. No house dog, I felt, would interrupt my progress; the mere
remembrance of the intruder above me set my mind at rest on this point.
I came to a stop at the head of the first stairway, puzzled by the
completeness of the quiet which encompassed me. I directed my
attention to each quarter of the compass, point by point.
But I might have been locked and sealed in a cistern, so complete was
the silence, so opaque was the blackness. Yet I felt that nothing was
to be gained by staying where I was.
So I groped and shuffled my way onward, rounding the banister and
advancing step by step up the second stairway. This, I noticed, was
both narrower and steeper than the first. I was also not unconscious
of the fact that it was leading me into a zone of greater danger, for
the floor I was approaching, I knew, would be the sleeping floor.
I was half-way up the stairway when something undefined brought me to a
sudden stop. Some nocturnal adeptness of instinct warned me of an
imminent presence, of a menace that had not yet disclosed itself.
Once more I came to a stop, straining my eyes through the darkness.
Nothing whatever was to be seen. Along the floor of the hallway just
above my head, however, passed a small but unmistakable sound. It was
the soft _frou-frou_ of a skirt, a skirt of silk or satin, faintly
rustling as a woman walked the full length of the hall. I had just
made a mental register of the deduction that this woman was dressed in
street-clothes, and was, accordingly, an intruder from outside, rather
than a sleeper suddenly awakened, when a vague suffusion of light
filled the space above me and was as quickly quenched again.
I knew the moment I heard the soft thud of wood closing against wood,
that a door had been quietly opened and as quietly closed again. The
room into which that door led must have been faintly lighted, for it
was the flowering of this refracted light that had caught my attention.
I went silently up the stairs, step by step, listening every now and
then as I advanced. Once I reached the floor level I kept close to the
wall, feeling my way along until I came to the door I wanted.
There was no way whatever of determining what stood on the other side
of that door, without opening it. I knew what risks I ran in
attempting any such movement. But I decided it was worth the risk.
Now, if a door is opened slowly, if every quarter-inch of movement is
measured and guarded, it can, as a rule, be done noiselessly. I felt
quite sure there was not one distinguishable sound as I cautiously
turned that bronze knob and even more cautiously worked back the door,
inch by inch.
I came to a stop when it stood a little more than a foot from the jamb.
I did not, at first, attempt to sidle in through the aperture; that
would have been needlessly reckless. I stood there waiting,
anticipating the effect the door-movement might have had on any
occupant of the room, had it been seen.
While I waited I also studied that portion of the chamber which fell
within my line of vision. I saw enough to convince me that the room
was a bedroom. I could also make out that it was large, and from the
rose-pink of its walls to the ivory-white of its furnishings it stood
distinctly feminine in its note.
There was, I felt, a natural limit to that period of experimental
inaction. The silence lengthened. The crisis of tedium approached,
arrived, and passed. Audaciousness reconquered me, and I actually
advanced a little into the room. Steadying myself with one hand on the
door-frame, I thrust my body through the narrow aperture until the
whole four walls lay subject to my line of vision.
The first thing I noticed was a green-shaded electric lamp burning on
what seemed to be a boudoir writing-table. It left the rest of the
room in little more than twilight. But after the utter darkness
through which I had groped, this faint illumination was quite adequate
for my purposes.
I let my gaze pivot about the room, point by point. Then, if I did not
gasp, there was at least a sudden and involuntary cessation of
breathing, for standing beside a second door at the farther end of the
room was a woman dressed in black. On her head was a black hat, round
which a veil was tightly wound, the front of it apparently thrust up
hurriedly from her face. But what startled me was the fact that both
her attitude and her position seemed such an exact duplication of my
own.
With one hand, I noticed, she clung to the frame of the door. With the
other hand she held back a heavy portiere, which hung across this
frame. I could see the white half-oval of her intent face as she stood
there. Something about her suggested not the spying intruder so much
as the secret listener. Her attention seemed directed toward some
object which her eyes were not seeing. It appeared as though she stood
waiting to overhear a sound which meant much to her.
As I peered past her through the dim light I could catch a faint
glimmer of green and white marble, with here and there the high-lights
reflected from polished nickel. I knew then that the room into which
she was peering was a bathroom, and this bathroom, I concluded, opened
on a second sleeping-chamber which held the _raison d'etre_ of her
motionless apprehension. I directed my glance once more at the woman.
Something almost penitential in her attitude brought the sudden thought
to my mind that she had committed a crime at the mere memory of which
she was already morally stricken. Unexpected discovery, I began to
suspect, had driven her to an extreme which she was already beginning
to regret. There was, in fact, something so pregnant and portentous in
that unchanging attitude of hers that I began to feel it would be a
mean surrender on my part to evade the issue in which I had already
risked so much. So I moved silently into the room, crossing it without
a sound, until I dropped into a high-backed _fauteuil_ upholstered in
embossed and pale-green leather.
I sat there studying her, unaccountably at my ease, fortified by the
knowledge that I was the observer of an illicit intrusion and that my
own presence, if impertinent, might at least be easily explained. I
saw her sigh deeply and audibly, and then gently close the door,
dropping the curtain as she turned slowly away.
I watched her as she crossed to the dresser, looked over the toilet
articles on it, and then turned away. She next skirted a heavy
cheval-mirror, crossed to the writing-table with her quick yet quietly
restless movements, and from this table caught up what seemed to be a
metal paper-knife. She moved on to an ivory and mother-of-pearl desk,
which, apparently, she already knew to be locked. For after one short
glance toward the curtained door again, she inserted the edge of the
knife in a crack of this desk and slowly pried on the lock-bar that
held it shut.
I saw her second apprehensive glance toward the curtained door as the
lock sprung with a snap. She sank into a chair before it, breathing
quickly, obviously waiting a minute or two to make sure she had not
been overheard. Then with quick and dextrous fingers she rummaged
through the desk. Just what she swept from one of the drawers into her
open hand-bag I could not distinguish. But I plainly saw the package
of letters which she took up in her hand, turned over and over, then
carefully and quietly secreted within the bosom of her dress. She
looked deeper into the desk, examined an additional paper or two which
appeared not to interest her, and slowly swung back the cover.
Then she slowly rose to her feet, standing beside the desk. She let
her gaze, as she stood there, wander about the room. I could
distinctly see the look on her face, the hungry and unhappy look of
unsatisfied greed. I sat motionless, waiting for that expression to
change. I knew that it must change, for it would be but a moment or
two before she caught sight of me. But I had seen enough. I felt sure
of my position--in fact, I found a wayward relish in it, an almost
enjoyable anticipation of the shock which I knew the discovery of my
presence there would bring to her. I even exulted a little in that
impending dramatic crisis, rejoicing in the slowness with which the
inevitable yet epochal moment was approaching.
Her eyes must have dwelt on my figure for several seconds before her
mind became convinced of my actual presence there. She did not scream,
as I thought she was about to do when I saw one terrified hand go up to
her partly open lips. Beyond that single hand-movement there was no
motion whatever from her. She simply stood mere, white-faced and
speechless, staring at me out of wide and vacant eyes.
"Good evening--or, rather, good morning!" I said, with all the calmness
at my command.
For one brief second she glanced back toward the curtained door, as
though behind it lay a sleeper my words might awaken. Then she stared
at me again.
She did not speak. She did not even move. The intent and staring
face, white as a half-moon in a misty sky, seemed floating in space.
The faint light of the room swallowed up the lines of her black-clad
figure, enisling the face in the unbroken gloom of a Rembrandt-like
background, making it stand out as though it were luminous.
It was a face well worth studying. What first struck me was its
pallor. Across this the arched, faintly interrogative eyebrows gave it
a false air of delicacy. The eyes themselves had a spacious clarity
which warned me my enemy would not be without a capable enough mind,
once she regained possession of her wits. Her mouth, no longer
distorted by terror, was the nervous, full-lipped mouth of a once
ardent spirit touched with rebellion.
She was, I could see, no every-day thief of the streets, no ordinary
offender satisfied with mean and petty offenses. There would, I told
myself, always be a largeness about her wrong-doing, a sinister
brilliance in her illicit pursuits. And even while I decided this, I
was forced to admit that it was not precisely terror I was beholding on
her face. It seemed to merge into something more like a sense of
shame, the same speechless horror which I might have met with had I
intruded on her bodily nakedness. I could see that she was even
beginning to resent my stare of curiosity. Then, for the first time,
she spoke.
"Who are you?" she asked. Her voice was low; in it was the quaver of
the frightened woman resolutely steeling herself to courage.
"That's a question you're first going to answer for me," was my calmly
deliberate retort.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded, still confronting me from the
same spot. I remembered the bundle of loot which I had dropped just
outside the door.
"I can answer that more easily than you can," I replied, with a slight
head-movement toward the broken desk-top.
Once more her glance went back to the curtained door. Then she studied
me from head to foot, each sartorial detail and accessory of clothing,
hat, gloves, and shoes, as though each must figure in the resolution of
some final judgment.
"What do you want?" she demanded.
I preferred to leave that question unanswered.
"What do you intend to do?" she demanded, once more searching my face.
I resented the way in which she anticipated my own questions. I could
see, from the first, that she was going to be an extraordinarily adept
and circuitous person to handle. I warned myself that I would have to
be ready for every trick and turn.
"What do you suppose I'm going to do?" I equivocated, looking for some
betraying word to put me on firmer ground. I could see that she was
slowly regaining her self-possession.
"You have no right in this house," she had the brazenness to say to me.
"Have _you_?" I quickly retorted. She was silent for a second or two.
"No," she admitted, much as she would like to have claimed the contrary.
"Of course not! And I imagine you realize what your presence here
implies, just as what your discovery here entails?"
"Yes," she admitted.
"And I think you have the intelligence to understand that I'm here for
motives somewhat more disinterested than your own?"
"What are they?" she demanded, letting her combative eyes meet mine.
"That," I calmly replied, "can wait until you've explained yourself."
"I've nothing to explain."
There was a newer note in her voice again--one of stubbornness. I
could see that the calmness with which I pretended to regard the whole
affair was a source of bewilderment to her.
"You've got to explain," was my equally obdurate retort.
Her next pose was one of frigidity.
"You are quite mistaken. We have nothing whatever to do with each
other."
"Oh, yes we have. And I'm going to prove it."
"How?"
"By putting an end to this play-acting."
"That sounds like a threat."
"It was meant for one."
"What right have you to threaten me?"
She looked about as she spoke, almost wearily. Then she sank into the
chair that stood beside the ravaged writing-desk. It was all diverting
enough, but I was beginning to lose patience with her.
"I'm tired of all this side-stepping," I told her. An answering look
of anger flashed from her eyes.
"I object to your presence here," she had the effrontery to exclaim.
"You mean, I suppose, that I'm rather interfering with your night's
operations?"
"Those operations," she answered in a fluttering dignity, "are my own
affairs."
"Of course they are!" I scoffed. "They _have_ to be! But you should
have kept them your own affairs. When you drop a bundle of swag out of
a window you shouldn't come so perilously near to knocking a man's hat
off."
"A bundle of swag?" she echoed, with such a precise imitation of wonder
that I could plainly see she was going to be the astutest of liars.
"The loot you intended carrying off," I calmly explained. "The stuff
you dropped down beside the house-step, to be ready for your getaway."
"My what?"
"Your escape. And it was rather clever."
"I dropped nothing," she protested, with a fine pretense of
bewilderment on her face.
"Nor let it roll quietly off a front window-ledge?" I suggested.
"I was near no window--it would be impossible for me to open a window,"
she protested. Her words in themselves were a confession.
"You seem to know this house pretty well," I remarked.
"_I ought to--it's my own_," was her quick retort.
"It's your own?" I repeated, amazed at the woman's mendacity.
"It _was_ my own," she corrected.
I peered quickly about the room. It held three doors, one behind the
woman, opening into the bathroom, a second opening into the hallway,
and a third to the rear, which plainly opened into a clothes-closet.
There had been too much of this useless and foolish argument.
"Since your claim to proprietorship is so strong," I said as I crossed
to the hall door, and, after locking it, pocketed the key, "there are
certain features of it I want you to explain to me."
"What do you mean?" she asked, once more on her feet.
"I want to know," I said, moving toward the curtained door beside her,
"just who or what is in that front room?"
The look of terror came back to her white face. She even stood with
her back against the door, as though to keep me from opening it, making
an instinctive gesture for silence as I stood facing her.
"I'm going to find out what is in that room," I proclaimed, unmoved by
the agony I saw written on her guilty face.
"Oh, believe me," she said, in supplicatory tones, a little above a
whisper, "it will do no good. It will only make you sorry you
interfered in this."
"But you've made it my duty to interfere."
"No; no; you're only blundering into something where you can do no
good, where you have no right."
"Then I intend to blunder into that room!" And I tore the portiere
from her grasp and flung it to one side.
"Wait," she whispered, white-faced and panting close beside me. "I'll
tell you everything. I'll explain it--everything."
The tragic solemnity of that low-toned relinquishment brought me up
short. It was my turn to be bewildered by an opponent I could not
understand.
"Sit down," she said, with a weary and almost imperious movement of the
hand as she advanced into the room and again sank into the chair beside
the writing-desk.
"Now what is it you want to know?" she asked, with only too obvious
equivocation. Her trick to gain time exasperated me.
"Don't quibble and temporize that way," I cried. "Say what you've got
to, and say it quick."
She directed at me a look which I resented, a look of scorn, of
superiority, of resignation in the face of brutalities which I should
never have subjected her to. Yet, when she spoke again her voice was
so calm as to seem almost colorless.
"I said this was my home--and it's true. This was once my room.
Several weeks ago I left it."
"Why?" I inquired, resenting the pause which was plainly giving her a
chance to phrase ahead of her words.
"I quarreled with my husband. I went away. I was angry. I--I--
There's no use explaining what it was about."
"You've got to explain what it was about," I insisted.
"You couldn't possibly understand. It's impossible to explain," she
went quietly on. "I discharged a servant who was not honest. Then he
tried to blackmail me. He lied about me. I had been foolish,
indiscreet, anything you care to call it. But the lie he told was
awful, unbelievable. That my husband should ask me to disprove it was
more than I could endure. We quarreled, miserably, hopelessly. I went
away. I felt it would be humiliating to stay under the same roof with
him."
"Wait," I interposed, knowing the weak link was sure to present itself
in time. "Where is your husband now?"
She glanced toward the curtained door.
"He's in that room asleep," she quietly replied.
"And knowing him to be asleep you came to clean out the house?" I
promoted.
"No," she answered without anger. "But when service was begun for an
interlocutory decree I knew I could never come back openly. There were
certain things of my own I wanted very much."
"And just how did you get into the house?"
"The one servant I could trust agreed to throw off the latch after
midnight, to leave the door unlocked for me when I knew I would never
be seen."
"Then why couldn't that trusted servant have secured the things, these
things you came after? Without all this foolish risk of your forcing
your way into a house at midnight?"
Her head drooped a little.
"I wanted to see my husband," was the quiet-toned response. Just how,
she did not explain. I had to admit to myself that it was very good
acting. But it was not quite convincing; and the case against her was
too palpably clear.
"This is a fine cock-and-bull story," I calmly declared. "But just how
are you going to make me believe it?"
"You don't have to believe it," was her impassive answer. "I'm only
telling you what you demanded to know."
"To know, yes--but how am I to know?"
She raised her hand with a movement of listless resignation.
"If you go to the top drawer of that dresser you will see my photograph
in a silver frame next to one of my husband. That will show you at a
glance."
For just a moment it flashed through me as I crossed the room that this
might be a move to give her time for some attempted escape. But I
felt, on second thought, that I was master enough of the situation to
run the risk. And here, at least, was a point to which she could be
most definitely pinned down.
"The other drawer," she murmured as my hand closed on the fragile
ivory-tinted knob. I moved on to the second drawer and opened it. I
had thrust an interrogative finger down into its haphazard clutter of
knick-knacks, apparently thrown together by a hurried and careless
hand, when from the other end of the room came a quick movement which
seemed to curdle the blood in my veins. It brought me wheeling about,
with a jump that was both grotesque and galvanic.
I was just in time to see the figure that darted out through the
suddenly opened door of the clothes-closet.
I found myself confronted by a man, a thin-lipped, heavy-jawed man of
about thirty-five, with black pinpoint pupils to his eyes. He wore a
small-rimmed derby hat and a double-breasted coat of blue cheviot. But
it was not his clothes that especially interested me. What caught and
held my attention was the ugly, short-barreled revolver which was
gripped in the fingers of his right hand. This revolver, I noticed,
was unmistakably directed at me as he advanced into the room. I could
not decide which was uglier, the blue-metaled gun or the face of the
man behind it.
"Get back against that wall," he commanded. "Then throw up your hands.
Get 'em up quick!"
I had allowed her to trap me after all! I had even let myself
half-believe that pleasant myth of the slumbering husband in the next
room. And all the while she was guarding this unsavory-looking
confederate who, ten to one, had been slinking about and working his
way into a wall-safe even while I was wasting time with diverting but
costly talk.
And with that gun-barrel blinking at me I had no choice in the
matter--I was compelled to assume the impotent and undignified attitude
of a man supplicating the unanswering heavens. The woman turned and
contemplated the newcomer, contemplated him with a fine pretense of
surprise.
"_Hobbs,_" she cried, "_how did you get here?_"
"You shut up!" he retorted over his shoulder.
"What are you doing in this house?" she repeated, with a sustained show
of amazement.
"Oh, I'll get round to _you_, all right, all right," was his second
rejoinder.
Hobbs' left hand, in the meanwhile, had lifted my watch from its pocket
and with one quick jerk tore watch and chain away from its waistcoat
anchorage.
"You're a sweet pair, you two!" I ejaculated, for that watch was rather
a decent one and I hated to see it ill-treated.
"Shut up!" said Hobbs, as his hand went down in my breast-pocket in
search of a wallet. I knew, with that gun-barrel pressed close against
my body, that it would be nothing short of suicidal to try to have it
out with him then and there. I had to submit to that odious pawing and
prodding about my body. But if my turn ever came, I told myself, it
would be a sorry day for Hobbs--and an equally sorry one for that
smooth-tongued confederate of his.
"You're a sweet pair!" I repeated, hot to the bone, as that insolent
hand went down into still another pocket.
But it did not stay there. I saw a sudden change creep over the man's
face. He looked up with a quick and bird-like side-movement of the
head. It was not until he wheeled about that I realized the reason of
the movement.
The actual motive behind the thing I could not fathom. The real
significance of the tableau was beyond my reach. But as I looked up I
saw that the woman had crept noiselessly to the hall door, and with a
sudden movement had thrust out her hand and tried to open this door.
But as I had already locked it, and still carried the key in my pocket,
her effort was a useless one. Just why it should enrage her
confederate was more than I could understand. He ignored me for the
time being, crossing the room at a run and flinging the woman in black
away from the door-knob. She, in turn, was making a pretense to resent
that assault. Why she should do this I did not wait to ask. I saw my
chance and took it.
Half-a-dozen quick steps brought me to the bathroom door, one turn of
the knob threw it open, and another step put me through it and brought
the door closed after me. There was, I found, a key in the lock.
Another second of time saw that key turned. A quick pad or two about
the cool marble wall brought my hand in contact with the light-switch.
The moment the light came on I darted to the inner door and tried it.
But this, to my dismay, was locked, although I could catch sight of no
key in it. I ran back for the key of the first door, tried it, and
found it useless. At any moment, I knew, a shot might come splintering
through those thin panels. And at any moment, should they decide on
that move, the two of them might have their own door into the hallway
forced open and be scampering for the street.
I reached over and wrenched a nickeled towel-bar away from the wall
opposite me. One end of this I deliberately jabbed into the
white-leaded wood between the frame and the jam of the second door. I
was about to pry with all my force, when the sound of yet another voice
came from the room before me. It was a disturbed yet sleepy voice,
muffled, apparently, by a second portiere hung on the outside of the
second door.
"Is that you, Simmonds?" demanded this voice.
I continued to pry, for I felt like a rat in a corner, in that bald
little bathroom, and I wanted space about me, even though that meant
fresh danger. The mysteries were now more than I could decipher. I no
longer gave thought to them. The first thing I wanted was liberation,
escape. But my rod-end bent under the pressure to which I subjected
it, and I had to reverse it and try for a fresh hold.
I could hear, as I did so, the sudden sound of feet crossing a floor,
the click of a light-switch, and then the rattle of the portiere-rings
on the rod above the door at which I stood.
"Who locked this door?" demanded the startled voice on the other side.
For answer, I threw my weight on the rod and forced the lock. I still
kept the metal rod in my hand, for a possible weapon, as I
half-stumbled out into the larger room.
Before me I saw a man in pajamas. He was blond and big and his hair
was rumpled--that was all I knew about him, beyond the fact that his
pajamas were a rather foolish tint of baby-blue. We stood there, for a
second or two, staring at each other. We were each plainly afraid of
the other, just as we were each a little reassured, I imagine, at the
sight of the other.
"For the love of God," he gasped, wide-eyed, "who are you?"
"Quick," I cried, "is this your house?"
"Of course it's my house," he cried back, retreating as I advanced. He
suddenly side-stepped and planted his thumb on a call-bell.
"Good!" I said. "Get your servants here quick. We'll need them!"
"Who'll need them? What's wrong? What's up?"
"I've got two burglars locked in that room."
"Burglars?"
"Yes, and they'll have a nice haul if they get away. Have you got a
revolver?"
"Yes," he answered, jerking open a drawer. I saw that his firearm was
an automatic.
"Where's the telephone?" I demanded, crossing the room to the door that
opened into the hall.
"On the floor below," he answered. He pulled on a brown blanket
dressing-gown, drawing the girdle tight at the waist.
"You can get to it quicker than I can," I told him. "Give me the gun,
and throw on the lights as you go down. Then get the police here as
soon as you can."
"What'll you do?" he demanded.
"I'll guard the door," I answered as I all but pushed him into that
hallway. Then I swung-to the door after me, and locked it from the
outside. "Quick, the gun," I said. There was no fear on his face now,
yet it was natural enough that he should hesitate.
"What are you? An officer?"
There was no time for an explanation.
"Plain-clothes man," was my glib enough answer, as I caught the pistol
from his hand. He switched on the hall lights.
He was half-way to the top of the stairs when a woman's scream, high
pitched and horrible, echoed out of the room where I had the two
confederates trapped. It was repeated, shrill and sharp. The face of
the big blond man went as white as chalk.
"_Who is that!_" he demanded, with staring eyes, facing the locked door
of the second room. Then he backed off from the door.
I flung a cry of warning at him, but it did not stop his charge. His
great shoulder went against the paneled wood like a battering-ram.
Under the weight of that huge body the entire frame-facing gave way; he
went lunging and staggering from sight into the dimly-lit inner room.
I waited there, with my gun at half-arm, feeling the room would
suddenly erupt its two prisoners. Then, at a cry from the man, I
stepped quickly in after him.
I had fortified myself for the unexpected, but the strangeness of the
scene took my breath away. For there I beheld the man called Hobbs
engaged in the absurd and extraordinary and altogether brutal
occupation of trying to beat in his confederate's head with the butt of
his heavy revolver. He must have struck her more than once, even
before the man in the hairy brown dressing-gown and the blue pajamas
could leap for him and catch the uplifted arm as it was about to strike
again.
The woman, protected by her hat and veil and a great mass of thick
hair, still showed no signs of collapse. But the moment she was free
she sat back, white and panting, in the same high-armed _fauteuil_
which I myself had occupied a half-hour before. I made a leap for her
companion's fallen revolver, before she could get it, though I noticed
that she now seemed indifferent to both the loss of it and the outcome
of the struggle which was taking place in the center of that pink and
white abode of femininity.
And as I kept one eye on the woman and one on the gun in my hand, I,
too, caught fleeting glimpses of that strange struggle. It seemed more
like a combat between wildcats than a fight between two human beings.
It took place on the floor, for neither man was any longer on his feet,
and it wavered from one side of the room to the other, leaving a swath
of destruction where it went. A table went over, a fragile-limbed
chair was crushed, the great cheval-glass was shattered, the
writing-desk collapsed with a leg snapped off, a shower of toilet
articles littered the rugs, a reading-lamp was overturned and went the
way of the other things. But still the fight went on.
I no longer thought of the woman. All my attention went to the two men
struggling and panting about the floor. The fury of the man in the
shaggy and bear-like dressing-gown was more than I could understand.
The madness of his onslaught seemed incomprehensible. This, I felt,
was the way a tigress might fight for her brood, the way a cave-man
might battle for his threatened mate. Nor did that fight end until the
big blond form towered triumphant above the darker clad figure.
Then I looked back at the woman, startled by her stillness through it
all. She was leaning forward, white, intent, with parted lips. In her
eyes I seemed to see uneasiness and solicitude and desolation, but
above them all slowly flowered a newer look, a look of vague exultation
as she gazed from the defeated man gasping and choking for breath to
the broad back of the shaggy-haired dressing-gown.
I had no chance to dwell on the puzzle of this, for the man enveloped
in the shaggy-haired garment was calling out to me.
"Tie him up," he called. "Take the curtain-cords--but tie him tight!"
"Do you know this man?" something in his tone prompted me to ask, as I
struggled with the heavy silk curtain-cords.
"It's Hobbs."
"I know that, but who's Hobbs?"
"A servant dismissed a month ago," was the other's answer.
"Then possibly you know the woman?" I asked, looking up.
"Yes, possibly I know the woman," he repeated, standing before her and
staring into her white and desolate face. It took me a moment or two
to finish my task of trussing the wrists of the sullen and sodden
Hobbs. When I looked up the woman was on her feet, several steps
nearer the door.
"Watch that woman!" I cried. "She's got a load of your loot on her!"
My words seemed merely to puzzle him. There was no answering alarm on
his face.
"What do you mean?" he inquired. He seemed almost to resent my effort
in his behalf. The woman's stare, too, seemed able to throw him into
something approaching a comatose state, leaving him pale and helpless,
as though her eye had the gift of some hypnotic power. It angered me
to think that some mere accidental outward husk of respectability could
make things so easy for her. Her very air of false refinement, I felt,
would always render her viciousness double-edged in its danger.
"Search her!" I cried. "See what she's got under her waist there!"
He turned his back on me, deliberately, as though resenting my
determination to dog him into an act that was distasteful to him.
"What have you there?" he asked her, without advancing any closer.
There was utter silence for a moment or two.
"Your letters," she at last answered, scarcely above a whisper.
"What are they doing there?" he asked.
"I wanted them," was all she said.
"Why should you want my letters?" was his next question.
She did not answer it. The man in the dressing-gown turned and pointed
to the inert figure of Hobbs.
"What about him? How did _he_ get here?"
"He must have followed me in from the street when the door was
unlocked. Or he may have come in before I did, and kept in hiding
somewhere."
"Who left the door unlocked?"
"Simmonds."
"Why?"
"Because he could trust me!"
There was a muffled barb in this retort, a barb which I could not
understand. I could see, however, that it had its effect on the other
man. He stared at the woman with sudden altered mien, with a foolish
drop of the jaw which elongated his face and widened his eyes at the
same moment. Then he wheeled on the sullen Hobbs.
"_Hobbs, you lied about her!_" he cried, like a blind man at last
facing the light.
He had his hand on the bound and helpless burglar's throat.
"Tell me the truth, or by the living God, I'll kill you! You lied
about her?"
"About what?" temporized Hobbs.
"You know what!"
Hobbs, I noticed, was doing his best to shrink back from the throttling
fingers.
"It wasn't my fault!" he equivocated.
"But you lied?"
Hobbs did not answer, in words. But the man in the dressing-gown knew
the answer, apparently, before he let the inert figure fall away from
his grasp. He turned, in a daze, back to the waiting and watching
woman, the white-faced woman with her soul in her eyes. His face
seemed humbled, suddenly aged with some graying blight of futile
contrition.
The two staring figures appeared to sway and waver toward each other.
Before I could understand quite what it all meant the man had raised
his arms and the woman had crept into them.
"Oh, Jim, I've been such a fool!" I heard her wail. And I could see
that she was going to cry.
I knew, too, that that midnight of blunders had left me nothing to be
proud of, that I had been an idiot from the first--and to make that
idiocy worse, I was now an intruder.
"I'll slip down and look after that phoning," I mumbled, so abashed and
humiliated that as I groped wearily out through the door I stumbled
over the Russian-squirrel bundle which I had placed there with my own
hands. It was not until I reached the street that I realized, with a
gulp of relief, how yet another night of threatening misery had been
dissembled and lost in action, very much as the pills of childhood are
dissembled in a spoonful of jelly.